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E-mail

Getting an Account

Drake University provides secure, fully-featured electronic mail services to all faculty, staff, students and emeriti.  These accounts are used for all official correspondence from the University.  For complete information regarding creation of e-mail accounts, usernames and passwords, see E-mail Account Information.

Reading and Sending Messages

Your e-mail messages, by default, are received and stored on a central server.  You may access your messages in either of two ways.  The first is by pointing your web browser to our web mail server, which communicates with our mail server.  This may be done from anywhere in the world, without having to configure an e-mail client.  Alternatively, you may install an e-mail client, such as Outlook, Eudora or Apple Mail, on your computer that will communicate directly with our mail server.  While most students choose web mail, most faculty and staff use an e-mail client, either alone or in combination with the web mail approach.  Please see E-mail Clients and Settings, for more complete information.

E-mail Viruses and Spam

The Office of Information Technology has put in place the resources necessary to prevent  virus-laden e-mail messages from reaching your computer.  Similarly, mechanisms for controlling spam are available and may be implemented by all students, faculty and staff.  For more complete information see E-mail Virus and Spam Protection.

E-mail Address Lookups

Virtually all e-mail clients and web mail to use a directory service to help you look up the correspondent's address.  See E-mail & Directory Services for additional information, including a step-by-step guide to configuring your e-mail client to use our Directory Service.

Setting Up a Vacation Notice

To notify your correspondents that you are away, you may set up a vacation notice on our mail server. Once you have done this, it is not necessary to set up anything in Eudora or Outlook and leave your computer running, since the message will actually be sent by the server. The vacation notice service is aware of most listserv processors and is smart enough not to send messages back to a distribution list. The vacation notice processor will send a notice to any given sender only once a week, although you may change this frequency.  We have prepared vacation notice set up instructions.  There is help available on the set up screen described therein.

Mailing Lists for Instruction, Administration and Professional and Student Organizations

A variety of locked and open (self-managed) mailings lists are provided for use by various constituents of the University.  Complete information on the accessibility of the locked lists and how to use the Mailman List Processor for managing the open lists is available.