Bryn Mawr College

Hello everyone, We have seen some fairly "believable" scam traffic in the last week or so, and we thought we would remind you of a few items that will help to keep your accounts safe. Never send any of your passwords or other personal information via email, or enter your password into a field inside an email message. Bryn Mawr Computing will never ask you to give or send us your password, especially via email. Spammers will sometimes include legitimate or legitimate-looking links in an email in order to make the email appear legitimate. This does not guarantee that ... Read more»

The College Voicemail system has encountered a serious hardware problem will be unavailable until further notice.  Some phones may still have a red voicemail light, but the voicemail system is unreachable from both on- and off- campus. At this time, we do not have an expectation as to when service will be restored. This outage does not effect cellular phones or cell phone voicemail. Amy Pearlman Head of Support Services for David Bertagni Head of Networking and Telecommunications

Have you ever had a laptop which, while still fairly new, does not hold a battery charge for more than 10 minutes? While there are multiple reasons this may happen, including manufacturing problems, and trauma to the battery, the most common reason this occurs is poor battery maintenance. While newer battery technologies (such as the Li-Ion batteries in most laptops and other consumer electronics) don't require the same care as their predecessors, they do still need some love.  When you get a new laptop, it is a good idea to first charge the battery overnight, then fully discharge and recharge it a ... Read more»

Do you have questions about next week's email change?  Are you wondering if you are affected?  Do you want more information? We will be sending out emails today to people who have been identified as being affected based on recent logins.  Whether you received an email, or you have not but believe you may still be affected, you can find out more at http://www.brynmawr.edu/computing/docs/emailChange/emailConnections.shtml

Please note: The test listed below has been suspended based on good response from the community and further analysis of our systems, allowing us to more accurately pinpoint affected individuals. The date of the change has been modified to allow us to successfully reach the affected individuals and prepare them; a new date will be announced later this week. --AP 2/17 On February 18, 2009 at 5pm, the POP protocol will be deactivated on the College email server. Additionally, we will be adding security for those using the IMAP protocol. This will necessitate changes for ... Read more»

Some folks have noticed that when reading a message in the preview pane (the area which displays the message below the message list), it is no longer immediately marked as read. In the new version of the Communication Center software, there is a new preference which allows you to delay the message being marked "Read" for a few seconds.  This preference is on by default and set to 5 seconds.  This is so that if you are navigating quickly from message to message without reading, the messages are not marked read by accident. You can modify this setting by going to your ... Read more»

On Friday evening, the Bryn Mawr Communication Center (a.k.a Webmail or Zimbra) underwent its first upgrade since it was installed in June. If you have logged into the Communication Center, you have probably noticed that it doesn't look very different.  This upgrade did not change the "look and feel" very much; the purpose of this upgrade was to correct some "bugs" that folks had reported, and also to make some new and improved features available to you.  In the time we have been using the Communication Center, we have received feedback and feature requests from many in ... Read more»

As you may have discovered, the new Communication Center allows others to share email folders with you.  Some offices are using this method to administrate departmental email accounts as well. However, some folks have reported that when searching from the search bar aat the top, the shared folders are not included. Click on the ‘Email’ button right next to the search bar to reveal a drop down menu. Choose  ‘Include shared items’ (found at the bottom of the dropdown).  This setting will be saved from session to session and will search all folders including those which are shared.

As you may have been hearing around campus and/or seeing in your own email, we have been receiving a number of emails claiming to be from Computing which ask for your username and password.  Some of them also ask for other personal information.  These are known as Phishing scams. What is Phishing? Phishing is a type of identity scam, typically in email, which attempts to collect some type of personal information in order to gain access to your accounts, financials, personal data, or other pieces of your identity.  The word is a play on "fishing" because the spammers are fishing for ... Read more»

About the Program: Every year Information Services upgrades some of the College-owned computers being used across the campus. Of these computers, those that are four years old are typically reassigned to less intensive uses (e.g. for student workers), or they are scavenged for parts. Whatever computers remained were previously donated to charity; those machines have been made available to Bryn Mawr staff and faculty through a two-year pilot program (we are in the second year).  Priority is given to community members who do not currently own a ... Read more»

Welcome back!  We hope the new email system is meeting your needs. We have just implemented the following new service to access files from off campus: A  VPN (Virtual Private Network) for the use of the community when off campus which provides secure access to files stored on our system.  This service is a replacement for Novell’s "NetStorage," and is now available to students and to those who have had their computers (and most importantly the associated networked files) transitioned to the new desktop environment. See for more information: http://www.brynmawr.edu/is/isir/documents/OffCampusAccess_000.pdf (For staff and faculty who have not yet ... Read more»

To limit your search results to the contents of a particular folder, put your search word or words in the search field, then type in:foldername.  For example, if I wanted to find all messages in my inbox containing the word project, then what I would type in the search field is: project in:inbox This can be combined with our tip about fining unread or tagged messages.  For example, to find all unread messages in inbox, you would type: is: unread in:inbox