ITS will close your access to file services on the Courses and Departments file shares, personal www webpages and authoring access to Word Press effective June 1. If these files are important to you, then you should save them elsewhere before this date. Please consult with the ITS Support Center (207-859-4222) if you need help with saving webpages or other files.
ITS deletes all graduated seniors’ accounts on August 31 following graduation. At account deletion time, your Colby computer account and password will cease to function. All of your e-mail messages will be removed from Colby computers. If these e-mails are important to you, then you should save them elsewhere before this date.
If you do nothing, what will happen?
Your e-mail address will no longer work effective August 31—Once this happens, you will become “user unknown” in the world of e-mail once your account is deleted. Any e-mail sent to your @colby.edu e-mail address will bounce back to the sender with a “user unknown” message.
You can prevent the trauma of “user unknown” by simply setting up an "out of office" e-mail response leading up to when your account closes. An "out of office" e-mail reply can be set up to send a message to people who email you that can include all of the information you want to share which will remain active up until the time your account closes. See below for some additional steps you can take to make sure this transition goes well.
- Obtain an e-mail account elsewhere. You may already have one at Outlook, Yahoo, or Gmail. You may have a new e-mail account at your workplace or graduate school. Make sure this e-mail account works before proceeding. If you don’t know how to do this, please consult with the ITS Support Center(207-859-4222).
- Transfer your Colby e-mail and Drive documents to another Gmail account using https://takeout.google.com/transfer.
- NOTE: If your Colby Google content exceeds 5GB (you can check your current storage usage here: https://drive.google.com/settings/storage), you will need to purchase additional storage for your personal Gmail account before you initiate the transfer.
- Click here for instructions to set an "out of office" message before August 31st (On August 31st, the out of office message will no longer work) - you can include other email addresses you want people to use to contact you or any other contact info you wish to share.
- Change any social media accounts, banking, job searches, etc that are linked to this e-mail address. Did you use your Colby e-mail as the recovery account for lost passwords?
- If you’ve created Google Drive documents and shared them with faculty members or others, you will need to change ownership.
- Download your documents, YouTube Videos, etc. Google Takeout lets you download all of your documents in one pass. Here is the link you need: https://google.com/takeout
Does Colby offer any email redirect services for you after your account is closed?
Colby does not offer this service. However, be sure to set an "out of office" email response to let people know leading up to the date of the account closing.
What about your Google Drive documents?
Once your email account is gone, so are your Google Drive documents. If you’ve created documents for staff or faculty members on Google Drive and shared them, you will need to change ownership. If you want to keep your Google Drive documents, use Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout to download all of your documents.