All About Email at Ohio Wesleyan

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ATTENTION: As of April 20, 2009 BishopMail (Google Apps for Education) will be used instead of our own internal email system.

Every current Ohio Wesleyan student, faculty, and staff are given an "@owu.edu" email account and a quota of storage space to use with it. Alumni are eligible for an Email For Life (EFL) account. This is the primary channel for communication from Ohio Wesleyan University. All official communication will be sent to this address.

Usernames

Our naming convention is the first initial of your first name + your middle initial + the first six letters of your last name, (jqpublic @ owu.edu for example.) If your last name is less than six letters the username will be your first initial + middle initial + whole last name. If your name happens to match someone who has already received an Ohio Wesleyan email account the username will be first initial + middle initial + the first five letters of your last name + a number to differentiate your account from anyone else's. Alumni EFL usernames are always the full first name (dot) full last or maiden name (dot) year of graduation, (john.public.1999 @ owu.edu for example.)

Accessing Your OWU Email

You may access your OWU email from any internet connected computer by using WebMail: mail.owu.edu. There is a link to OWU WebMail under both Faculty/Staff and Students menus. You may also configure an email client, such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, or Mozilla Thunderbird, to manage your OWU email account. Instructions for setting up these email clients are available here.

The two most common reasons why an email account does not work are incorrect login information or exceeding your quota. When you log into your email account your username must be entered in lower case and your password is Case Sensitive. Make sure you don't have the Caps Lock or Num Lock keys on! If you can log into your email account, the problem is not your credentials. You may have exceeded the quota for your account. To check this, log into your J/CX Web Access and click on Show Quota under My Account. It will ask for your password and then tell you whether you are over quota or not. If so, you will need to delete messages to bring your storage usage back under your quota. Note that being over quota for more than seven days will disable your account. If neither of the above solutions solve the problem contact the Help Desk.

Dealing with Spam

All current students, faculty and staff email accounts include spam protection by Postini, which delivers a daily quarantine report of blocked messages. Quarantined messages are held for 14 days before being permanently deleted. Messages delivered from quarantine will arrive with their original date/time stamp, so they may not be at the top of your inbox. Everyone who receives a Postini quarantine report can manage their own Postini account by going to login.postini.com and entering their email address and password. If you don't know or remember your password, just enter anything in the password field and it will give you a link to have a new one sent to you. You may add addresses to your whitelist once you access your Postini account. Note that Alumni EFL accounts do not have Postini protection, but are protected by Barracuda, our legacy spam protection.

Other Important Information about OWU Email

• All About OWU WebMail
• Email Client Setup Guides
• OWU Password Guide
• Account Over Quota Guide
• Email Forwarding Guide
• Email Auto-Response (Out of Office) Guide
• Campus-wide Distribution Lists and Policy

A Final Word About Email Security

Many computer viruses are spread via email, by copying addresses contained in the address books and contact lists of infected computers. This is why it is important that you should not open any attachment that you are not expecting. If you receive any email attachment that you were not expecting, you should contact the sender to verify that they purposely sent you the attachment before you open it. It is also imperative that you have up-to-date antivirus software on your computer.

Also keep in mind that a large percentage of the virus warnings circulating via email are hoaxes. Forwarding these bogus warnings takes time and computing resources. They sometimes cause people to take unnecessary or even damaging actions. Before forwarding any virus warning, always verify the information through a trusted anti-virus resource, such as the McAfee Threat Center, or an urban legends reference site, such as Snopes.com.

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Still need help?

For assistance please contact the help desk.