OIT upgrade causes errors with WebMail

Students found their Duke WebMail failing to forward messages to their Gmail and Yahoo accounts
Students found their Duke WebMail failing to forward messages to their Gmail and Yahoo accounts

Recent technical difficulties have prevented the forwarding of Duke WebMail messages to third-party accounts used by members of the University community, including Gmail and Yahoo.

The Office of Information Technology implemented a scheduled system upgrade at 6 a.m. Monday that resulted in the problems, said Steve O’Donnell, senior communications strategist at OIT. A number of Internet service providers blacklisted mail from Duke, blocking large numbers of Duke emails that typically forward automatically to the accounts.

As of yesterday, OIT was gradually forwarding emails from Duke accounts to other providers and attempting to minimize transfer delays, O’Donnell said.

“We’re talking about hours here, not days,” he said in an interview yesterday afternoon.

OIT reported the issue through its alert system, which members of the community can subscribe to through email or RSS, O’Donnell said. The department’s Twitter, @DukeOIT, also provided updates.

“There are still messages in queue, and we will keep this alert posted until we can confirm that all forwarding messages are going to the outside mail systems without delay,” read a notice posted at 2:49 p.m. yesterday that remained posted late yesterday evening.

Freshman Jack Clark said he first noticed the problem yesterday when there was a significant time difference between the arrival of email to WebMail and to his Yahoo account.

“It’s probably a temporary problem,” he said. “I just check my Duke account a little more often now.”

Lindsey Berlin, a junior, said all her emails arrived in her Gmail account within 24 hours. She said she will continue to use a third-party email account in place of Duke’s system despite the problems.

“I’m still not going to use Webmail,” she said. “I haven’t been on it since I came to Duke.”

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