Many companies that support email (Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN) have had to install spam blocking tools. Along with these tools, they allow for the enduser to whitelist / safelist certain email addresses/domains that the end user does not want blocked.

Any MyUSI user that forwards their myUSI email should add

usi.edu AND usieagles.org

to their safelist.

If you do not know how to do this, check the help documentation of the email service that you are using OR stop autoforwarding your usieagles.org account and read your USI related mail with myUSI’s e-mail application only.

Some spam blocking tools will automatically block mail if all recipients are blind carbon recipients (as is the case with myUSI send to class email, for instance). Email providers such as Hotmail will keep the mail in a Junk folder for only 5 days and then it is automatically deleted.

If you do not put usi.edu and usieagles.org in your email provider’s safelist/”not spam” lists, and you aren’t checking your Junk Mail or Bulk Mail folders on a daily basis, then you are probably permanently losing email from the university, your instructors, or anyone else trying to email you at that address.

——————–

Alternately, you may have a typo in the email address that you set up in your Email Autoforward Option or there is a problem with your email provider. Check your Autoforward address under the Email application’s Option tab and make sure that it is a functioning address. We have many instances of people mispelling their email address and having mail sent to those non-existent addresses disappearing.

If you alternate email account is having problems, i.e. it has been disabled until your remove some of your email, any mail, including that from MyUSI may be blocked. Make sure that your external/alternate email account is fully functioning as a malfunctioning account may also be the source of your problems.

If you forwarded your mail to another email account, you can remove the forward in order to have your mail delivered locally. Just follow these steps:

1. Open the e-mail application by clicking on the e-mail icon in the upper right of the myUSI page.
2. Click on the Options tab
3. Click the Auto Forward link
4. Clear the address in the Auto Forward To: field
5. Click the OK button

Your mail should now only show up in myUSI. Send yourself a test message to confirm that your email is going where it is supposed to.

Many companies and organizations run these sorts of deals and create the rules that require a .edu address under the mistaken assumption that all schools use .edu addresses for all of their email systems.We don’t use .edu for our student email domain. However, usieagles.org is registered to the University of Southern Indiana and has the same technical and administrative contacts as as the domain registration for usi.edu.

It is really those organizations and companies that aren’t honoring that relationship due to poor planning and bad assumptions on their part. Anyone can verify that usieagles.org is a valid University of Southern Indiana owned domain using publicly available and widely understood tools.

USI is not the only institution of higher education to use multiple (non edu) domains. There are many schools that use .org addresses for their student email. We had the same problem with Facebook when it was only open to universities. After Facebook realized that a number of institutions of higher educuation use .org addressing for their student email, they changed their policies to allow registrations from these valid domains.

The best step to take when encountering this problem is to contact the organization running the promotion. If you can’t find any contact information, it probably isn’t a place you want to deal with anyway. If it is a company with multiple divisions, like Microsoft, or Dell, Gateway, or Apple, try to find their education division. Most offer some sort of toll free 800 number for sales inquiries.

Tell them to do a whois lookup on usieagles.org and on usi.edu. The results of those searches will clearly show that both domains are owned by this university. That should prove the relationship and hopefully they will work with you to get your discount.

Other companies will accept other forms of proof of your enrollment with a university. See if the company offering the promotion will accept something besides an email address to prove your eligibility. It should be noted that email isn’t very concrete proof of enrollment as many institutions give .edu addresses to alumni that wouldn’t be eligible for educational discounts. Some forms of proof that many companies accept include faxed photocopies of your student ID, and proof of enrollment letters from the Registrar’s Office.

See Also:

• Podcast Episode 2: Why is the address of myUSI www.usieagles.org?
• Why is the address for myUSI www.usieagles.org?

• You must have cookies enabled (or at least per-session-cookies).
• You must have JavaScript enabled.
• You have to have pop-up blocking disabled for www.usieagles.org
• If you want chat capabilities, you have to have Java installed and enabled
• You probably want to “allow,” “white list,” or “safe list” www.usieagles.org, mail.usieagles.org, and sctssb.usieagles.org in your (or your employer’s) firewall.
• The sctssb.usieagles.org site talks over ssl at port 9000. This might be important information for your security software or your employer’s firewall or Internet proxy server administrator.

These stand for Carbon Copy (CC) and Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) respectively.

Carbon copy is used to let someone else know about a message even though they are not the primary person the message was intended for.

The people listed on Blind Carbon Copy will also receive the message, but the people on the To and CC address lines will not see the names of anyone on the Blind Carbon Copy list.

Forwarding email in myUSI is a simple operation.

1. From the main myUSI page, click the email icon in the upper right. This will open the email console.
2. In the email console, click on the Options tab and then click on the Auto Forward link.
3. In the Auto Forward options, add the email address you’d like your mail forwarded to in the Auto Forward To: field and then click the OK button.

NOTE: Be sure to TEST your forwarded email account. We have had many users forward their mail to non-existent or broken accounts. If you don’t test your configuration, there is a good chance that you will lose communications from the university as we send only to your usieagles.org account.

To test your configuration, send a test message to your @usieagles.org address and see if it shows up at the address that you set up for Auto Forwarding.

If it doesn’t show up, there is a problem with the address that you entered in the Auto Forward field and it needs to be corrected before you will receive any mail originally sent to your original @usieagles.org address.

Your forwarded address could be mistyped or the email account settings on the forwarded address (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) need to be changed in order to accept email from your forwarding address.

If you choose to change the default configuration, it is your responsibility to make sure that it works and won’t potentially lose communications.

If you aren’t sure how to make this work, you probably don’t want to change the default and, instead, check your myUSI email on a regular basis.

This is podcast is related to the FAQ article: “Why is the address for myUSI www.usieagles.org?”

Download myUSI Frequently Asked Questions Episode 2

Podcast music available from ccmixter.org

Usually, the more complete form of this question is “why is the address of myUSI www.usieagles.org instead of something ending in .edu?”

Part of the reason is because our hands are tied. Registrations in the .edu domain are reserved for colleges and universities that grant degrees at the bachelor, master and doctoral level, or its non-U.S. equivalent.

The United States Department of Commerce awarded the management of the .edu top level domain to the nonprofit Educause Association in 2001 with a few stipulations. One of those stipulations was that each institution could have only one .edu domain name.

Many people point out that other schools have more than one domain and that is true. However, those domains are grandfathered in as they existed before the 2001 agreement. It should be noted that the wording of the agreement leaves the possibility that this could change in the future. The pertinent sections of the agreement state:

• All institutions holding names as of October 29, 2001 in the .edu domain will be allowed to keep them without regard to institutional eligibility requirements at this time.*
• Only a single name in the .edu domain will be assigned to any given institution.

*emphasis added

The rest of the reason hinges on sud-domains and email addresses. Sub-domains are extensions of the original domain. In the University of Southern Indiana’s case, the domain is usi.edu. A sub-domain would follow the form sub-domain.usi.edu.

The university already uses the usi.edu domain for its separate faculty and staff email system. Faculty and staff email addresses generally end in @usi.edu in regards to this configuration. In order to be able to route mail to students, however, a sub-domain would have to be used. If that were the case, then student mail would generally end in @sub-domain.usi.edu.

This can cause problems for receiving mail from a general Internet population that isn’t used to people having sub-domains in their email addresses. If someone sent a message and left off the important sub-domain part of the address, the message might not get delivered. This is probably part of the reason that an informal survey of students revealed that they preferred having their own domain of @usieagles.org rather than a sub-domain of usi.edu.

Since the 2001 Educause agreement, many other institutions have taken similar steps and moved some or all of their student email to .org addresses. It is very easy to verify that the university’s .org domains, which include usieagles.org and myusi.org, belong to the University of Southern Indiana using standard, well understood, tools that confirm domain registrations.