District Office of Information Technology
Network Services and Computer Operations

E-Mail Accounts and Client Configuration

E-mail accounts are provided for all students, faculty and staff of the District. In order to qualify for an account, a student must be enrolled in one or more classes for the current semester, or registered for the upcoming semester, and faculty and staff must be currently employed with the district and have a current assignment full or part time. User accounts are set up within 24 hours of enrollment or employment.

District E-mail utilizes the TCP/IP based POP protocol commonly used on the Internet. The mail servers can be accessed with any POP compliant E-mail client from the district network or the Internet. E-mail user IDs for district email accounts take the format of first initial+lastname followed by a domain.name. If the combination of first initial and last name results in a non unique ID such as "jsmith", the second account established will be appended with a sequence number beginning with 1, 2, 3, etc. For student accounts, all IDs are appended with 0, 1, 2, 3 etc., whether or not the ID is ambiguous.

Note: The assignment of a suffix digit is based on the order of appearance of other data which occurs in files used to automatically generate the user's ID, or first-come first-served basis, and does not imply preference or favoritism of any kind.

Domain names that may be used with Student E-mail IDs are

• saddleback.edu, and
• ivc.edu

Domain names for staff and faculty of the colleges and district are

• socccd.org
• saddleback.edu, and
• ivc.edu

Domain names for staff of Advanced Technology Education Park only are all of the above, plus

• atep.us

NOTE: Faculty from the colleges who may instruct at ATEP may NOT use the atep.us domain.

Any of the domain.names applicable to each group (Faculty/Staff or Students) as indicated are valid interchangeably with the user ID in that group. If you prefer to be associated with a particular school or the district, simply use the appropriate domain name as your E-mail address or return address when configuring your client. Method may vary from one client to another. Please note that the district domain socccd.org is not valid with student accounts.

Server Names and Other Information

E-mail clients require the identification of POP (aka POP3) account, POP (aka POP3) server, and SMTP server. The following information may be used to configure E-Mail clients to send and retrieve mail using the districts mail servers.

About Leaving Mail On The Server

When configuring a POP Email Client, there is typically an option to leave messages on the server for a period of time.  It is recommended that any option to Leave messages on server be disabled (NOT CHECKED). As a general rule, when configuring an E-mail client for operation on the district network, DO NOT leave messages on the mail server. Messages left on the server are deleted based on aging criteria which may result in them being purged from the server irrespective of the users desire.   Once they have been deleted, or retrieved and written to the local hard disk of your computer, they are NOT generally retrievable thereafter.

However, this option MAY be used under the following off-campus circumstances.

E-mail from home via the Internet

Outgoing mail (SMTP) server: If you have an Internet account through an ISP, you must configure your Email client to use your ISP's SMTP server to be able to send mail using your Internet account from home or off-campus. The district's SMTP mail server (mail.socccd.org) cannot be used to send mail from the Internet or an ISP account. This prevents the district's computing resources from being used to send unsolicited commercial email (UCE), also known as SPAM.

Generally, you receive an email account with your ISP service, and the name of the SMTP server is indicated in the ISP setup instructions. Contact your ISP for the name of your SMTP server.

Leaving POP3 Message on the server. You may want to select the option of Leaving messages on the server after retrieval. This will make the messages you retrieve from home available to the E-mail client on your computer at work, such that they will be retrieved and stored locally on your work computer's hard disk, and then deleted. For Students: Students do not have permanently assigned workstations on the district network, and therefore home computers should be configured without this option selected.

Other Email Accounts

The information provided above is generally applicable to and appropriate for configuring any POP E-mail client for retrieval of District E-Mail. Many clients provide the ability to specify alternate identities, also known as personalities, the purpose of which is to be able to retrieve E-mail from other servers, such as provided by your Internet Service Provider. In order to send messages under any personality from on-campus, you must use the district's SMTP server regardless of the POP server for the account.  Consult your mail client documentation or other Email service provider for additional assistance.

A Brief Word about Security
If you think E-mail is secure, think again. As a rule it would be more accurate to say that E-mail is generally private, but by no means secure. E-mail messages can be intercepted en route, read by persons that have special privileges on the mail servers, read from the outgoing, or incoming mail queues, and many other points on a network between the sender and the receiver. E-mail is frequently forwarded to others and you have no control over that. It can even be accidentally sent to the wrong addressee, or an unintended recipient who is included in a group address list. Consequently, E-mail should never be considered a fully secure, nor necessarily private means of communication.

Electronic mail can also be sent by someone else to appear as if you sent it! This is a violation of Board Policy and Administrative Regulations as well as state and federal laws, but it can be done. Electronic signatures and digital encryption afford some additional measure of security by helping to authenticate the source of messages and protect content but are often difficult to use. The Internet and our own mail systems make no provisions for integration with such security. A general understanding of how the E-mail system works will alert you to the potential risk of using E-mail and how to protect yourself from information falling into the wrong hands. If you would like to know more about how E-mail works, consult your college library, municipal library, or the technical section of any good bookstore. The Internet itself may be an excellent source of information on this topic.

Think before you send.

Related Information:

• Using Webmail
• Directory Services
• Board Policy and Administrative Regulation concerning Acceptable Network Use