CalMail Migration
This page is deprecated, but remains here for reference. Campus email service has since migrated from CalMail to bMail.
WHAT IS CALMAIL?
CalMail (http://calmail.berkeley.edu) is the campus-run email service. It currently hosts 65,000 user accounts and 70,000 alumni re-directs. They offer email service for both individuals and for campus departments. We will be utilizing the CalMail Departmental Domain Email Service.
WHY ARE WE MIGRATING TO CALMAIL?
There are a number of reasons that make migrating to calmail at this point in time attractive.
- E-mail has become a commodity service that is no longer unique to the needs of our community.
- The cost of running an email service locally exceeds the cost of running at a larger scale (approximately $2/month/box vs. $0.50/month/box)
- CalMail offers many of the same features as IRIS currently offers. See notable functional and operational differences below.
- CalMail is very well run and IRIS and CNIL have great confidence in the service and the team that runs it based on their track record of the past several years.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CALMAIL DOMAIN ACCOUNT AND A CALMAIL INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNT?
You may already have a CalMail individual account at user@berkeley.edu. Departmental domain accounts are managed completely separate from regular CalMail accounts. Even if you have a CalMail account already, a new domain account will need to be created for you for @eecs.berkeley.edu. After the migration is complete you will be able to access both the individual or domain CalMail account. If you use the CalMail Web client, after authenticating with your CalNet ID, you will be asked whether you would like to access your individual CalMail or your EECS domain CalMail account.
WHAT ARE THE NOTABLE FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN IRIS IMAP AND CALMAIL?
- CalMail uses SpamAssassin for spam tagging whereas IRIS has been using Barracuda Anti-Spam Appliances which is essentially a customized version of SpamAssassin.
- There is a 50MiB size limit for incoming and outgoing email on CalMail where there were no limits on IRIS IMAP or other IRIS mailservers.
- All CalMail accounts will have a quota of at least 10 GiB in place. More details below.
- CalMail offers a management interface to the end user that has more configurable settings.
- You can authorize an administrative assistant to have read/write access to your email.
- You can manage permissions on individual folders.
- You can set the level of Spam tagging to none, low, medium, and high.
- You can setup email forwarding for yourself.
- You can opt out of SpamHaus DNS blocking.
- CalMail only retains backup data for two weeks. If you discover missing data two weeks after the loss, disaster recovery is not possible.
- CalMail does not forward probable spam. If your EECS CalMail account is configured to forward email without saving a copy, probable spam will not be forwarded, it will be silently dropped. If your EECS CalMail account is configured to forward email and “Save a copy of incoming mail in my Inbox”, probable spam will not be forwarded, instead it will be filtered into your EECS CalMail spam folder. If you have an EECS CalMail redirect instead of an EECS CalMail account, probable spam will not be forwarded, the mail will just be discarded. For an EECS CalMail mailing list, probable spam will not be distributed, the mail will just be discarded.
- CalMail makes use of a feature called “email deduplication”. If you are sent multiple copies of a message, only one copy will be found in your EECS CalMailaccount; if you forward elsewhere from your EECS CalMail account, the multiple copies will be forwarded. For example, a message addressed to both fraser@eecs and fraser@cs would result in only one copy in fraser’s EECS CalMail account.
WHAT ARE THE NOTABLE OPERATIONAL DIFFERENCES FOR THE EECS CALMAIL SERVICE?
- An active CalNet ID is required to create and use an EECS CalMail Account.
- The name chosen for your EECS CalMail account needs to be the same as your IRIS login name to maintain consistency.
- IRIS staff will no longer have access to mail and forwarding logs, therefore will not be able to trace delivery or non-delivery of email messages. IRIS will also no longer have change log history for @EECS.Berkeley.EDU email forwarding.
- For EECS CalMail accounts, you can change email forwarding yourself or you can contact help@eecs.
- help@eecs is the contact point for updates to EECS CalMail redirects. EECS CalMail redirects are the @eecs email delivery for people without EECS CalMailaccounts and for mailing lists.
WHO WILL BE MIGRATING TO CALMAIL?
All @eecs @cs and @erso email will be handled by CalMail. If you use the IRIS IMAP server, you will need to migrate your saved mail on the IRIS imap server to your EECS CalMail account. Those who access their email on one of the Microsoft Exchange servers will not be migrating email folders at this time.
WHEN WILL THE MIGRATION HAPPEN?
Migration will begin in July 2010 and will be completed by May 2011.
WHAT IS THE SCHEDULE FOR MIGRATION (OF SAVED EMAIL)?
We will be identifying at least three separate populations for separate phases of the migration. Users will be notified.
- Phase 1 – Those that have a system administrator who can assist with the migration
- Phase 2 – Those that have less than 2GiB of data on IMAP who can do the simple migration themselves
- Phase 3 – Those that have larger amounts of data or whose migration will be more complicated.
CAN YOU PROVIDE A MORE DETAILED TIMELINE FOR THE MIGRATION?
Sure. Some of the details are still being worked out, but here is what is known so far.
- 06/29/2010 – CalMail will become the Mail eXchanger (MX) for EECS.Berkeley.EDU, CS.Berkeley.EDU and ERSO.Berkeley.EDU.
- Nothing will be required on your part at this time.
- At this point, CalMail will become the designated mail server for incoming email for those domains.
- CalMail will initially be configured to deliver all that email to the former IRIS MX mail servers.
- CalMail will be applying their anti-spam and anti-malware processes to our email including targeted greylisting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting) and SpamAssassin tagging (http://spamassassin.apache.org/).
- CalMail will refuse to accept certain emails for us
- From devices on certain Spamhaus’s blacklists (SBL & XBL) (http://www.spamhaus.org)
- Phishing email and malware as determined by ClamAV(http://www.clamav.net/)
- Phishing email as determined by APER (http://code.google.com/p/anti-phishing-email-reply/)
- During this initial MX cutover phase, CalMail will then deliver our email to the former IRIS MX mail servers including probable spam.
- The IRIS Barracuda anti-spam appliances will continue to supply their current anti-spam flagging, malware blocking and Spamhaus blocking.
- Email will be forwarded as it is done now.
- The incoming 50MiB message limit will also be in place.
- 09/07/2010 – All IRIS email accounts with valid CalNet IDs will be created on the EECS CalMail Domain.
- Nothing will be required on your part at this time.
- 09/09/2010 – The EECS CalMail domain will be activated along with the alias CS and ERSO domains.
- Nothing will be required on your part at this time.
- All @eecs, @cs, & @erso email forwarding will be handled by CalMail.
- postmaster@eecs will no longer be the contact for email forwarding. help@eecs will become the contact address for updates to @eecs email forwarding.
- If you have an EECS CalMail account, it will be configured to forward to where your email is currently being delivered.
- Mail that is tagged as “probable spam” will no longer be forwarded.
- At this time it is possible to login to https://calmail.berkeley.edu and modify the configuration of your EECS Domain CalMail Account but please do not modify the configured forwarding. Email will not be delivered to your EECS Domain CalMail Account until you change the forwarding configuration. You should not do this until data migration in one of the three phases below is complete.
- Oct 2010 – Migration of Phase 1 Begins
- Users in this population will be notified by their System Administrator
- Nov 2010 – Migration of Phase 2 Begins
- Users in this population will be notified and given specific instructions of how to migrate.
- Feb 2011 – Migration of Phase 3 Begins
- Users in this population will be notified and given instructions/expectations of the migration process.
- 5/18/2011 – imap.EECS.Berkeley.EDU service ends.
WILL OUR @EECS @CS AND @ERSO EMAIL ADDRESSES STAY THE SAME?
Yes. We will be using the CalMail departmental domain service. Your email address will stay the same, meaning that all mail sent to user@eecs, user@cs, and user@erso will continue to be delivered to you.
WILL OUR USERNAMES AND PASSWORDS STAY THE SAME AFTER MIGRATING TO THE CALMAIL EECS DOMAIN?
- You will use your CalNet passphrase instead of your IRIS LDAP or windows password.
- EECS CalMail authentication for IMAP/SMTP requires using your @EECS.Berkeley.EDU address and CalNet passphrase. Even if you send email as @CS.Berkeley.EDU or @ERSO.Berkeley.EDU, you will still use an @EECS.Berkeley.EDU address for authentication.
- EECS CalMail authentication for the web interfaces uses your CalNet ID and CalNet passphrase; after authorization, you can select your @EECS.Berkeley.EDU account.
HOW WILL USERS WHO ARE DOING THEIR OWN MIGRATION MOVE THEIR STORED EMAIL FROM IMAP.EECS.BERKELEY.EDU?
There are many ways to migrate such data. Two ways are imapsync and drag&drop in your MUA (e.g. Thunderbird).
Those of you with just a few folders will probably be happy to just drag-and-drop those folders to CalMail using Thunderbird after first setting up Thunderbird to access CalMail.
However, most people with a lot of folders will want to use imapsync. We have a separate FAQ page on how to use imapsync.
WHO CAN GET A CALMAIL ACCOUNT?
Any faculty/staff/student or other affiliate with an active CalNet ID can get a CalMailaccount.
HOW WOULD VISITORS AND PEOPLE NOT HIRED YET GET CALMAILACCOUNTS?
People (faculty/staff/students) requiring CalMail accounts before they are active in HRMS or SIS will need to be granted affiliate status first, once their affiliate status is activated and they are in CalNet, they will be able to create a CalMail account. It takes several working days to get an affiliate account activated in HRMS, then 24 hours for it to show up in calnet, at which time it is usable.
WILL OUR MAILING LISTS ON @LISTS.EECS.BERKELEY BE MOVING AS WELL?
No. Many of the mailing lists are auto-generated from our roster database. These will remain on lists.eecs.berkeley.edu and we currently have no plan to retire this machine.
WILL THERE BE A QUOTA ON THE SIZE OF MY IMAP FOLDERS?
Yes. For quotas larger than the normal CalMail quota of 10 GiB, the EECS CalMaildomain admins will contact the CalMail admins. The EECS CalMail domain admins can be contacted via help@eecs. Your initial quota will be set reasonably higher than your current usage on EECS IMAP.
WILL THERE BE A CHARGE FOR MAIL STORAGE ABOVE THE NORMAL 10 GIB CALMAIL QUOTA?
No. There are no additional charges for storage at this time. There may be additional charges in the future.
WHAT HAPPENS TO MESSAGES LARGER THAN 50MIB?
The email sender will receive a Returned Mail Delivery notice. The body of the message will indicate that the email was not delivered due to exceeding the SMTP size limit.
WILL I KEEP MY CURRENT MAIL FOLDERS?
You may migrate your current mail folders from the IRIS IMAP server to your EECS CalMail account and the naming will remain the same.
WILL THE DATES ON MY OLD EMAIL MESSAGES STAY THE SAME?
Yes. The dates and times of your old email messages will not change.
WILL THE WEBMAIL INTERFACE CHANGE?
Yes. CalMail offers both Round Cube https://CalMail.berkeley.edu/rc/ and SquirrelMail https://CalMail.berkeley.edu/webmail. You can access those pages via https://CalMail.berkeley.edu/.
WHAT ABOUT LDAP AND ADDRESS AUTO COMPLETION?
Our LDAP will not be changing at this time. Auto completion for accounts in IRIS using ldap.eecs.berkeley.edu will continue.
WILL MY EXISTING SERVER SIDE FILTERS, WHITE/BLACK LISTS BE MIGRATED TO CALMAIL?
Since there is no simple way to ensure that these will migrate cleanly, you will be responsible to create new sieve rules on CalMail. There is a simple web interface on CalMail to manage these rules. We encourage you to take this opportunity to review the rules that you would like to have in place after the migration as there may be differences in the spam tagging/blocking rules in place with CalMail.
WILL MY IPHONE/BLACKBERRY/PALM/WINDOWS MOBILE/G1 DEVICE WORK WITH CALMAIL?
Yes. CalMail supports IMAP for email and is compatible with iPhones, Blackberrys and most mobile devices in use today. You will need to change the settings on your phone in order to begin receiving mail.
WILL I STILL BE ABLE TO USE OUTLOOK/THUNDERBIRD/APPLE MAIL, ETC. TO CHECK MY EMAIL?
Yes. CalMail support IMAP for email and is compatible with all modern email clients. Your email client will have to be re-configured to work with CalMail. We will have tutorials available and the helpdesk can assist with any questions you may have.
IS THERE SPAM FILTERING ON CALMAIL?
Yes. CalMail offers anti-spam and antivirus filtering that is very effective at filtering out the majority of spam you may receive. You can also set the level of spam tagging for your account from the web interface.
ARE THERE INSTRUCTIONS/DOCUMENTS/GUIDES FOR SETTING UP AND USING CALMAIL?
Instructions for setting up Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or Outlook may be found on the CalMail website.
Calmail has a knowledge base with answers to most questions you may have about using their service. Of course, you can always email help@eecs.berkeley.edu with any questions you may have.
DOMAIN ADMINISTRATION – WHAT CAN DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS DO?
You should refer to this page: https://CalMail.berkeley.edu/docs/domainserv.html for all the domain administrator details, but generally they can do the following:
- increase email quotas
- set vacations and forwards
- view status information for accounts, redirects and lists
- create and maintain redirects
- initiate the account cancellation process
WHO ARE THE DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS FOR THE EECS CALMAILDOMAIN?
There will be helpdesk staff that are domain administrators; they will be able to assist with any of the above functions.
WHAT IF I HAVE A PROBLEM THAT CAN’T BE HANDLED BY THE DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS?
The escalation path for problems is the following:
- All email questions should still be sent to help@eecs
- If the helpdesk team cannot resolve your issue, they will contact the CalMailsupport team and alert the operations manager to the problem.
- Problems of a unique nature that cannot be resolved by the helpdesk and CalMail team are escalated to the CalMail system administrators and the CTO is alerted to the issue for collaborative troubleshooting.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REDIRECT AND A FORWARD IN CALMAIL?
If you have an EECS CalMail account a forward is used to deliver email to another location. An EECS CalMail redirect, on the other hand, delivers email to another location when there is no account.
MY USER@EECS (OR @CS/@ERSO) EMAIL IS CURRENTLY FORWARDED TO A SERVER OTHER THAN THE EECS IMAP SERVER. WILL I BE AFFECTED BY THIS CHANGE?
Your mail forwarding will continue as before. Only messages under 50 MiB in size will be forwarded. However, once the EECS CalMail domain is activated, mail that is tagged as “probable spam” will NOT be forwarded. See the timeline above for more details.
WHAT IS CALMAIL “PROBABLE SPAM”?
Probable Spam is defined as having a Spam score of 50% or higher by SpamAssassin. If you setup a forwarding address or a redirect, CalMail will not forward Email that is tagged with a 50% or higher SPAM score. This behavior is different from how IRIS IMAP works, where all email that is not blocked is forwarded despite the spam score. CalMail can be configured to behave differently on a per-user basis by special request. Please contact help@eecs if you require something different.
LIST OF REFERENCES
- The Main CalMail Site http://calmail.berkeley.edu
- List of Supported Clients https://kb.berkeley.edu/jivekb/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=4&externalID=1886IST
- Knowledge Base Articles About CalMail https://kb.berkeley.edu/jivekb/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=4
IRIS CalMail Migration FAQ v. $Revision: 1.25 $
Last updated: $Date: 2011/04/18 18:39:02 $