The Information Technology Office will be shutting down the old clergymail e-mail server on Monday March 28th, 2011.  All Clergy e-mail accounts have been migrated to the new system and the old server is no longer accepting messages.  Please note the following:

Late yesterday afternoon the main Conference e-mail gateway suffered a fatal hardware error.  This server was critical to routing e-mail to and from the remaining clergy e-mail accounts on the old server.  As such, we were forced to accelerate our migration plans.  As of this writing all of the clergy e-mail accounts have been successfully migrated to the new Google Apps system.  If you receive a bounce error for a clergy e-mail account AFTER 2:30 PM EST please feel free to let us know via the contact page.

All of the remaining clergy on the old server received an e-mail this afternoon with migration instructions and their user name and password.  Please follow these directions to activate your mailbox on the new server.  If you were forwarding your clergy e-mail account previously then you will need to set up the forward again.  The instructions for this process are listed in the before referenced e-mail.  If you have any questions or concerns regarding the migration (or need help transferring e-mail and contacts from the old server) please feel free to contact the IT Office directly.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices will be working in the coming weeks to migrate all of our Clergy e-mail accounts to our new Google Apps system.  When this project is complete all of our Clergy (Retired and Active) and Conference Staff will be able to interact and collaborate on the same Google Apps system.  We will all be able to take advantage of the Gmail web interface for e-mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.  In short, if you have an nccumc.org account you will be able to participate in this online collaboration.  This new system provides a large range of features that will help our Clergy better communicate with each other, with members of their congregation and with the Conference Staff.  We are very excited to begin offering this technology soon.

Please note the following migration timeline:

• The IT Office will work directly with a small pilot group (10-20) in the next two weeks to begin their migration.
• Depending on the success of the pilot group the next group (approx. 100) will be migrated in Mid February.
• The remaining e-mail accounts will be migrated in early March.

If you have a Clergy e-mail account hosted on our old server you will be contacted via e-mail when we are ready to migrate your account.  The Conference Staff will be happy to address any migration issues we encounter during the process.  We look forward to working with you during this exciting time of transition.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices worked in December to finish migrating all of our local church domain (Ramus) e-mail accounts from the old Surgemail server to the new Ramus Google Apps system.  As such we will be shutting down the old Surgemail server on Friday, February 4th 2011.  If you have any important information still on the Surgemail server that has not been migrated to the Ramus system we will need to complete the transition by this date.  Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions, concerns or need any help with the rest of the transition.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices have been working over the last several months to migrate the Conference’s e-mail and collaboration infrastructure over to the Google Apps system.  Along the way we have received several good questions regarding issues of privacy and the various Google services.  Since we have received these questions we decided to compile all of the answers into one comprehensive privacy document.

We have currently migrated all of the Conference Staff and District Offices over the last few months.  All of our Local Church domain e-mail accounts are being migrated this week.  The remaining clergy e-mail account migration will begin after the new year in middle to late January 2011.  Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns after reading over this information.

Google has rolled out an update to their Gmail and Google Apps services that allows the Conversation View to be disabled.  Gmail can now display e-mail in chronological format the same way that Microsoft Outlook does.  You can find out more about it over on the Faith & Technology Blog.

The Information Technology Office is working this morning to address an SSL security issue. If you receive any SSL related error messages while checking your e-mail or browsing to the Clergy webmail address please be patient while we work to address it. We will post any updates to this page.

Update 11:24 AM: The SSL Certificate problem has been addressed. All clients should be connecting normally now. Please report any errors received after this time to the IT Office directly. You can contact us here.

E-mail delivery to rr.com e-mail addresses has been restored.  All backlogged e-mail from the last 3-4 days was delivered this morning.  Please continue to report any outages to the IT Office.

The Information Technology (IT) Office has completed repairs on all Conference e-mail delivery systems.  All of the major Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been informed of our repairs and have now removed our servers from their spam filters.  Please do not send a repeat e-mail if you have sent one recently that has not been returned.  If you have not received a bounce error or the recipient has not yet received the message, then it is still sitting in our e-mail queues.  Now that all of the major ISP’s have removed us from their block lists we anticipate full resumption of e-mail delivery within the next twelve hours.

All Internet Service Providers are now processing our e-mail normally with the exception of RoadRunner.  Due to their restrictive inbound rate limiting policies, delivery of the RoadRunner backlog in our queues will take longer.  Unfortunately, there is nothing further that the IT Office can do except to wait for their policy limits to time out.  If you have sent e-mail to a rr.com e-mail address and it hasn’t yet bounced, then it is still sitting in our queues waiting to be delivered.  Please do not send it again.  It should deliver or bounce within the next twelve hours.

On a related note, we have initiated limits on the rate at which we send e-mail to any rr.com e-mail address.  This is done in the hope that we will not experience delivery delays again.  While this may introduce a small artificial delay in delivery during times of regular usage, we hope that this change will prevent wide scale outages of service to this domain during times of peak usage.  As we move forward the IT Office will be monitoring the effects of our own rate limiting policy to make sure that it does not have a large impact on overall operations.  Roadrunner’s inbound policies affect e-mail traffic from all organizations, not just ours.

Those of you who have been reporting issues over the last few days regarding e-mail not delivering properly should check your e-mail accounts tomorrow to see if the e-mails have delivered.  Please continue to check this webpage for updates and contact Douglas Ward directly with any questions, concerns or outage reports.

The Information Technology (IT) Office is addressing an issue involving spam e-mail being sent through our e-mail servers.  This has caused a considerable amount of backlog for our legitimate traffic since our servers have been blacklisted.  You may be receiving a high volume of e-mail errors at this time.  We are working to resolve these issues and expect full e-mail delivery to be restored within the next 12-24 hours.  As always, updates will be posted on this website.  We regret the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this issue.  Please feel free to contact Douglas Ward with any questions or concerns.