Email Replies to non-Undergrads

Email Replies to Expiry Inquiries From Users Who Are Not Undergraduate Students

For Graduate CS students, these accounts expire on terms when the grad student in question is neither teaching, nor taking a course. A fairly common occurrence is that the students do not realize that the account expiring is not their main account.

A similar situation sometimes also aries for those in post-doctoral postitions who do sessional lectures for some terms.

Sample Email Replies to Such Users

It seems it might be helpful to have templates to address the common situation of a user whose transient CS-TEACHING (student.cs) account expires, even though their CS-GENERAL account will remain for at least a while longer.

Text shown in the colour red cannot be used literally, although most of the other text probably can in some situations.

Reply to a post-doctoral lecturer who had taught for several terms. Steps are taken to ensure their CS-GENERAL account remains for a year after they last teach, which exceeds the expiry period for their CS-TEACHING account.

From arpepper@uwaterloo.ca Thu Oct 20 14:02:23 2011
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:02:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: Adrian Pepper <arpepper@uwaterloo.ca>
To: pdlecturer@uwaterloo.ca
Subject: Re: Your pdlecturer@student.cs account has expired
Cc: accounts@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca

The account referred to is the one actually on the Teaching
environment, student.cs.uwaterloo.ca.

Steps were taken to preserve your main account in the General
environment, core.cs.uwaterloo.ca, until Sep 12, 2012.

If you have a need to keep your teaching region account around, let us
know, here at "accounts@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca", and we can arrange to do it.


Adrian Pepper, CSCF

Reply to a graduate student who sent mail indicating they are taking a break between finishing their Masters and starting their PhD.

From arpepper@uwaterloo.ca Mon Oct 31 17:37:36 2011
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:37:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: Adrian Pepper <arpepper@uwaterloo.ca>
To: futurephd@uwaterloo.ca
Subject: Re:  Fwd: Your futurephd@student.cs account has expired
Cc: accounts@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca

The account referred to is the one actually on the Teaching
environment, student.cs.uwaterloo.ca.

Steps were taken to preserve your main account in the General
environment, core.cs.uwaterloo.ca, until Jan 31, 2013.

And, if you return for doctoral studies in January 2012, your
core.cs.uwaterloo.ca account will be preserved for as long as
you remain registered (plus a year after that).


Adrian Pepper, CSCF

Reply to a graduate student who just did not realize that CS-TEACHING accounts are transient, or did not fully understand the distinction between a CS-TEACHING and a CS-GENERAL account, etc.

From arpepper@uwaterloo.ca Wed Nov 16 16:37:10 2011
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:37:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Adrian Pepper <arpepper@uwaterloo.ca>
To: csgradstudent@uwaterloo.ca
Subject: Re:  How to Keep My Account?
Cc: accounts@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca

The account referred to is the one actually on the Teaching
environment, student.cs.uwaterloo.ca.

Your main account in the General environment, core.cs.uwaterloo.ca
will remain.

You will receive a student.cs account again during terms when you take
courses which we have been informed require such an account, or if you
sign up for teaching duties again in future terms.


Adrian Pepper, CSCF

Reply to a graduate student who was worried that the handling of @cs.uwaterloo.ca by mailservices would break when the student.cs account was removed. See implicit queries in the reply.

From arpepper@uwaterloo.ca Thu Dec 15 18:57:03 2011
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:22:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Adrian Pepper <arpepper@uwaterloo.ca>
To: csgradstudent@uwaterloo.ca
Subject: Re: Your csgradstudent@student.cs account has expired
Cc: accounts@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca

csgradstudent@cs.uwaterloo.ca will not be expiring.

Personal email addresses of the form @cs.uwaterloo.ca or @student.cs.uwaterloo.ca
are deprecated; the @uwaterloo.ca form is now mandated.

Currently the delivery of the mail to mailservices is accomplished by
forwarding the mail from one actual SMTP server to another, but that
may change in the future.

Yes, mail sent explicitly to your student.cs.uwaterloo.ca account/address
will bounce, but mail to your cs.uwaterloo.ca account/address will work.

The UNIX login accounts and resources are independent of the mail facilities.
By which I mean "csgradstudent@student.cs" is intended in the message to be
shorthand for "UNIX login account on student.cs.uwaterloo.ca".

So, in fact, referring to the login account as "Your csgradstudent@student.cs"
is probably a mistake.  Although removing it does (at least currently)
have the side-effect of breaking the email address.  Addresses using
@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca are deprecated, in any case.  As an aside though,
the "@" syntax is used by some remote access commands such as scp.

Or, to address another possible misunderstanding, if you login, e.g. by
ssh, to *.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca or *.cs.uwaterloo.ca, you are not
logging into any machine in any way associated (apart from the email
forwarding) with any machine hosting mailservices.uwaterloo.ca.


Adrian Pepper, CSCF

-- AdrianPepper - 16 Nov 2011

Referers

• IncludeUndergraduateAccountsGradExpiryReplies
• UndergraduateAccounts