Library & Technology

Email

Students, read about the introduction of LAWnet email aliases and the move to Exchange email accounts in December 2011.

All Duke Law faculty, staff and students use Duke's Exchange email. The following information is designed to help the law school community make the best use of Exchange and Outlook. Further information can be found on OIT's Exchange pages.

Frequently Asked Questions About Email

  1. Why are faculty and staff no longer using GroupWise? Duke University no longer licenses Novell software, making its maintenance exorbitantly expensive for the law school. As the university offers professional services like Exchange and Outlook software, the law school can cede such functions to the university and concentrate on services that are unique to our needs.
  2. Why were Microsoft Exchange and Outlook selected as our email system? And why two names? Exchange is the service; Outlook is the software you run on your computer. Many people refer just to Outlook. The decision to use Microsoft Outlook was the university's; we have chosen to use the university's offerings. However, Outlook is the most widely used enterprise email and calendaring solution, and it would be a natural choice in any evaluation of email software.
  3. Will my email address change? Your law email address will not change. However, we are also offering full name aliases. Thus, wmiller@law.duke.edu is Wayne Miller's existing email address, and it will continue to work; however, Wayne's email will now be going out under wayne.miller@law.duke.edu. Please let us know at the help desk if you would like this as well. New staff accounts will only be created with full name aliases; new faculty accounts will be created both as last name and as full name aliases.
  4. Why aren't we using Google mail? The university is actively investigating Gmail and other free email systems that exist "in the cloud" (on the Internet). There are many privacy, security and service-level issues that need to be resolved before Duke would commit its faculty and staff email to one of these services.
  5. Are there recommendations for mailbox size? We recommend no more than 10,000 messages in any one folder and no more than 50,000 messages total in your mailbox. Also, you should delete outgoing and received messages with large attachments; email is not the appropriate place to keep important files.
  6. Are there limits to the size of the email messages I can send and receive? There is a 20MB size limit for any message coming in from the Internet and sent from Exchange. In practice, messages sent over the Internet will have a lower limit because attachments need to be encoded for transport (usually limiting the message size to approximately 15MB). It bears noting that many if not most email systems impose a size limit similar to this. If you need to send files that are larger, we can recommend better ways. Please contact the help desk for assistance (613-7072, helpdesk@law.duke.edu).