Rationalising email aliases (2016 December 2)
Thank you, everyone, for your forbearance during the recent reorganisation of
the email aliases on the school mail system – that is, the @physics.gla.ac.uk
addresses (the @astro.gla.ac.uk
system and addresses have not so far been
touched).
The aliases are/were a set of ‘friendly’ aliases which were advertised to
replace the sometimes cryptic, or too-informal, usernames on the school unix
system. For example, my username on that system is norman
, and the address
n.gray@physics.gla.ac.uk
redirected to this underlying account.
Winnowing this system of aliases was long overdue, recalling that the
University nominally moved all addresses to the @glasgow.ac.uk
domain
about five years ago. A large fraction of these @physics.gla.ac.uk
email
aliases were effectively defunct, and now mostly gathering spam. But
not all – quite a few people still receive email at those addresses,
mostly because they are signed up to services or lists using these
addresses, and it is hard to change this.
After a certain amount of to-and-fro, I believe we have now cut down the list of
active aliases to only those people who positively wish to continue to use them.
If you test this, by sending email to yourself at your @physics.gla.ac.uk
address, and it bounces, but you still wish to use this address, let me know.
Notes:
-
This process has not changed the underlying unix accounts, only email forwarding. At some point over the summer, I will start pruning these unix accounts, too (some accounts are very old, and not all of the system's users are still this side of the Lethe). I'll be back in touch with people about those, around that time. Until then, nothing will be deleted.
-
This affects only the aliases: email addressed to the underlying address (eg,
norman@physics.gla.ac.uk
, in the example above) will still be accepted. That won't be fixed until I winnow these accounts next year. -
This does not affect
@astro.gla.ac.uk
users. I'll get round to you later... -
The email on both
@physics.gla.ac.uk
and@astro.gla.ac.uk
is now something of an anachronism (central IT might put the position more strongly). I have no particular plans to remove the email system, but I wouldn't encourage you to start using addresses in these domains.