Leaving UIC: an exit strategy

If you have received a notice about termination of ACCC services, consider making a transition to another e-mail and network storage provider as soon as possible. You will have more time to weigh your options and ask us any questions you might have. This page is in beta.

• Route e-mails addressed to netid@uic.edu to an external address
• Back up messages in your UIC e-mail account to your computer
• Transfer messages to another account
• Set up an automatic reply
• Back up contents of your Webdisk
• Back up files on tigger or icarus

What this means:

• Changing where your netid@uic.edu e-mail is routed will only affect new incoming e-mail.
• It will not transfer existing messages that are in your UIC e-mail account to an external one.
• If you want to transfer or back up your messages, this should be your first step since you won't have to worry about new messages received while you do the backup or transfer (strongly recommended if you have custom filters set up to filter messages into folders).
• After you make the change, any new e-mail addressed to netid@uic.edu will not be stored in your UIC e-mail account.

Example: Darth Vader (netid dvader) wants all new incoming e-mail addressed to dvader@uic.edu to be automatically routed to askywa1@gmail.com.

Change e-mail routing

Note for POP users: If your e-mail client is configured to use POP (or POP with Leave Mail on Server) your messages are already stored on your computer and will remain available even after your access to ACCC services is terminated.

• Warning: If you are copying many and/or large messages, the download will take time depending on the speed of your internet connection and the number and size of the messages.
• First, configure your e-mail client to access your UIC e-mail account using IMAP. Instructions for configuring common e-mail clients along with screenshots are available here. Why IMAP? If you've ever created any e-mail folders in your account (for example, using Webmail), you will need to use IMAP to access them, since POP can only access your inbox.
• The next step varies by client:
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Apple Mail
• Microsoft Outlook
• Eudora
• Once your messages are copied successfully to your computer, you can remove the UIC IMAP configuration from your client. A backup of your messages will now exist on your computer.

Disclaimer: There is no easy way to transfer your messages to another account. If your new e-mail provider supports IMAP, you can simply copy/move messages to your other account after backing them up. The method described below takes advantage of redirecting messages, which is similar to forwarding, except that it preserves the information about the sender so that the messages will appear to have been sent by the sender and not you. This method is not bullet-proof and will depend on how your e-mail client deals with Resent-To headers. Proceed with caution!

Not all e-mail clients can redirect a message. To the best of my knowledge, only two e-mail clients can do this:

• Pine. If you are a pine user, use B to "bounce" e-mail to the external address. As far as I know, you have to do this one-by-one, so you might want to look into downloading and installing:
• Mozilla Thunderbird with the Mail Redirect extension. The author of this extension is Pawel Krzesniak, not affiliated in any way with ACCC or University of Illinois.
• If you know any other clients capable of redirecting messages, let me know.

You will have to download install and configure Mozilla Thunderbird first.

Next, download and install the Mail Redirect extension:

• Click on the Install Now button on the extension page. If you are using Firefox, right-click and select Save Link As... to download the file, otherwise Firefox will attempt to install it.

• In Thunderbird, select Tools, then Add-ons (for Windows users it's Tools, then Extensions).

• Click on the Install button and locate and select .xpi file (for version 0.7.4, the filename is mail_redirect-0.7.4-mz+tb.xpi), then click Open.
• When prompted, click Install Now. The extension will be installed after a restart, so close and reopen Thunderbird.

You won't notice anything different after reopening Thunderbird. To redirect one or more messages:

• Select one or more messages and right-click or click on Message (top menu). If this is the first time you're doing this, select just one message to test the functionality of the plug-in.
• Choose Redirect from the drop-down menu.

• Alternatively, use the Apple + B (Ctrl + B for Windows users) shortcut on the selected message(s). A new window will pop up.
• In the new window, enter the e-mail address of your other e-mail account and click on the Redirect icon.

You can also add a Redirect icon to your toolbar, by clicking View, then Toolbars and Customize... Drag and drop the icon on the toolbar.