Reference Guidelines for AESOP Account Holders

Because the e-mail policies for SEBS/NJAES do differ from other University systems, it is important to summarize these issues for users. Please refresh your awareness of these matters by reading below if you use AESOP (the Agricultural Experiment Station Operations system) for e-mail.

1) Retention of e-mail: Although large messages and large folders are allowed, these attachments should be downloaded for safekeeping on departmental equipment. Do not use AESOP as a repository for these large files. All e-mail, by directive of the Dean's Office is subject to deletion on the AESOP server after one year. In practice, highly managed e-mail accounts with good folder organization are relatively unaffected by these sweeps, since most email has already been moved to a different folder, or unnecessary mail has been deleted. The sweeps target folders where email over 1 year old is left in the following folders: newmail (inbox), Sent, Drafts, Sent Items, Sent Message. Those in this category will notice messages older than one year are periodically removed. Messages in the mail and newmail_copy folders will be purged back to 6 months, as it almost always corresponds to a user set to download email from the server, but also set to keep a copy on the server. Since the emails have already been downloaded locally, we do not feel a need to keep such messages in these two folders for more than 6 months. Items stored in Deleted Messages are stored for 30 days, and items in other trash folders, such as Wastebasket, Trash, and Deleted Items, are purged periodically throughout the year, so do not store anything long term in one of these folders. If you require old messages that are left on the server in this manner, they should be downloaded to departmental hardware for safekeeping.

2) Backups: AESOP backups are now retained for a period of 60 days. The backup procedure is strictly for disaster recovery and no archive exists. Messages that have been deleted longer than 60 days ARE NOT RECOVERABLE on the AESOP server.

3) CookPeople Distribution List: cookpeople@aesop is a comprehensive distribution list for all SEBS/NJAES personnel. It is to be used EXCLUSIVELY for official business. Computers located within the Rutgers domain are permitted to send to cookpeople with the exception of student eden accounts. The USER COMMUNITY enforces compliance with this policy. If you send a personal item to cookpeople, EXPECT the user community to respond with criticism. We prefer to leave cookpeople as a self-policed list. The accounts belonging to the cookpeople list are not expandable nor viewable and is not a source of external spam. Removal of current faculty and staff from the CookPeople list is by request and approval of the Senior Executive Associate, Gail Alexander.

4) Eligibility for an AESOP account: All SEBS/NJAES faculty and staff are eligible for AESOP accounts. Requests for RCE accounts must first be directed to Gary Huntzinger for pre-approval. Requests for financial system access must be directed to Rachele Sylvan for pre-approval. Other persons who have a formal relationship with SEBS/NJAES, but not employed here, may also be eligible to have an AESOP account. Account requests not requiring pre-approvals should be directed to Karl Lindauer by departmental administrators.

5) AESOP aliases: There are several established aliases for AESOP that can be used instead of AESOP in the host portion of the e-mail address. They are SEBS.Rutgers.Edu, Cook.Rutgers.Edu, NJAES.Rutgers.Edu, AES.Rutgers.Edu, etc.. All of these host names point to AESOP. Departmental administrators can request departmental alias names to point to AESOP also. We can virtual host e-mail hostnames, just as we do websites.

6) Personals Distribution List: COOKPEOPLE is the OFFICIAL BUSINESS electronic mailing list for SEBS/NJAES. If you have non-SEBS/NJAES business, please send to PERSONALS@AESOP. Now, the somewhat subjective issue is "What actually constitutes official business?" There are clear examples of items that don't meet the official business criteria, such as personal items for sale, jokes, pyramid schemes, etc. It is not the desire of ITS to play the role of "e-mail police" in an academic environment.

7) Remote Email Options: Only users that have accounts that end in RUTGERS.EDU (except EDEN) and their computers are connected directly (Rutgers dialup or part of the Rutgers network) are able to send to COOKPEOPLE. Users from AOL.COM, MSN.COM, etc. will not be able to send to COOKPEOPLE. If you need to send to COOKPEOPLE and are not on campus, you have two options. (1) You can set up your email client to perform an authenticated send and send directly to AESOP (see http://SEBSITS.rutgers.edu/emailissues.html for details), or (2) you can use your AESOP account and send via our web based email (see http://SEBSITS.rutgers.edu//webmail.html for details).