Larger e-mail mailboxes and a suite of new tools are now available to students and soon will be available to faculty and staff. The university is retiring its "postoffice" e-mail system and moving students to Google Apps Education Edition, a free suite of online communication and collaboration tools for educational institutions, and faculty and staff to a Microsoft Exchange system.

The familiar NetID@cornell.edu e-mail address format will continue for all users.

Google Apps, which Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) has dubbed Cmail, offers mailboxes that are more than 20 times larger than what Cornell now provides, plus personal calendars, instant messaging, Web site space and secure ways to share and work together on documents.

CIT also had planned to offer students the similar Microsoft Live@edu with Outlook Live service, dubbed Umail, but has determined that the service does not yet meet Cornell's requirements. It may be offered this academic year, depending on what Microsoft is able to deliver.

All new students entering since April were given Cmail accounts when they activated their NetIDs. Returning students are being encouraged to switch their existing postoffice accounts to Cmail. More than 9,000 returning students have decided to use Cmail. Counting the nearly 6,000 new students who automatically received Cmail accounts, about half the student body is now on Cmail.

"We will be launching a publicity campaign to get more students to switch to Cmail, with the desire to have most continuing students on Cmail by the end of this academic year," said Chuck Boeheim, assistant director of systems services in CIT, adding that the goal is to be able to shut down the postoffice system soon after.

Later this fall CIT expects to begin moving some 15,000 faculty and staff accounts from the postoffice system to a Microsoft Exchange server maintained by CIT, offering each user 7 GB of space along with new ways to integrate e-mail, calendar, task lists and address books; more options for organizing e-mail; and flexible, secure ways to delegate e-mail and calendar management to other individuals. Graduate and professional students will be offered Exchange accounts in addition to Cmail.

The move to Exchange will be carried out one college or unit at a time, on a staggered schedule lasting into early spring. Once everyone has moved, calendaring will be switched from the current Oracle calendar system to an Exchange calendar.

Any e-mail program will work with the Exchange system, but Microsoft Outlook for Windows, Microsoft Entourage for Macintosh and Apple Mail 4 -- part of Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system -- all include tools for integrating mail, calendar and contact lists. CIT will offer a suite of software tools to help users migrate from other e-mail programs; it has been testing the transition by migrating the accounts of small groups of CIT staff and IT support providers first.

CIT offers free instructor-led and self-directed training for using Outlook and Entourage. The complete list of training resources is at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/training/office2007/outlook.cfm. Units that plan to switch to these e-mail clients can request workshops for their faculty and staff or can run their own training programs using or adapting CIT's training materials.

To find out more about the new Exchange system for faculty and staff, see http://www.cit.cornell.edu/facstaff_email/. To find out more about Cmail for students, see http://www.cornell.edu/student_email/.