Network Account Removal

To remove your account, you must yourself first delete all your e-mail and account files (presumably after transferring whatever you wish to keep onto an account elsewhere or onto removable media), and then contact the computer support staff to request that the account be removed. (Prior to contacting us, please follow the procedure given below to verify that your account and e-mail are truly empty. The computer support staff wishes neither to inspect your files nor to be responsible for their deletion.)

Once your account is removed, any e-mail sent to your former math e-mail address will be rejected. If you instead prefer incoming mail to be forwarded, please provide the forwarding address. We will maintain the forward for 2 years; after that, we may eliminate it at any time without warning. (You may also contact us to have it removed sooner, should you discover, for example, that the forward is a source of spam.)

How to tell whether your account and e-mail are empty

• Open a terminal window. (Since you are probably doing this remotely, you should connect to your account using SSH.)
• Use the command ls -l /var/spool/mail/accountname (substituting your account name for accountname) to see whether your incoming mail box is empty. (It should report a size of “0”, or report that the file does not exist.)
• Use the command cd; ls -al to see whether your account is empty. If it is empty, the listing will show only the . and .. pseudo-directories, and nothing else, as in this example:

  [someuser@puma someuser]$ cd; ls -al
  total 12
  drwxr-xr-x    2 someuser users        4096 Feb 20  2005 ./
  drwxr-xr-x  108 root     root         8192 Feb 16  2005 ../
  

• Another good test is to check your quota. It should report that your block usage is zero.
• Once your account and e-mail are empty, please contact the computer support staff to have your account removed.

Math Department Policy on Post-Affiliation Accounts

• Anyone affiliated with the math department may request a network account; moreover, when your affiliation ends (e.g., you are a graduate student and you graduate, or you are a faculty member and take a position elsewhere), to give you a transition period in which to move your e-mail and account files elsewhere, you may keep your account for up to 1 year.
• However, during that year, since your math e-mail address is our only way of contacting you, you should forward your math e-mail to your new address; or, as an alternative, you must check your e-mail here at least once a week. (Inability to contact you is one of the grounds for account deletion. See last two items below.)
• At some point in that year following your departure, you must yourself delete (presumably after having saved or transferred whatever you wish to keep) all your e-mail and your account files, after which you should inform us that the account is empty and should be removed. We will provide minimal assistance in helping you gain remote access to your files.
• Once your account is eliminated, any e-mail sent to you here will be rejected, unless you separately request that e-mail be forwarded to a different address, which will be done for up to 2 years.
• If you have exceptional circumstances, you may request an additional 1 year account and/or e-mail forwarding extension. Generally speaking, the purpose of this provision is to assist former graduate students in their transition to permanent employment. The computer staff may directly honor the request, or may review it with a graduate program head, with the department chair, or with the computer committee.
• The computer staff is not required to warn you that your extension period is going to expire, nor is the computer staff required to contact you prior to removing your account. Nonetheless, insofar as it has the resources to do so, the computer staff may make a reasonable attempt to track you down, and may periodically send you a message to remind you about the account. If such messages are sent to you, then you must respond; otherwise, the account is considered abandoned, and the next item below applies.
• If we are unable to contact you via your math e-mail address at any time during an account extension period or during a post-account e-mail forwarding period, or if the account extension or e-mail forwarding periods have expired without hearing from you, we may exercise our option to permanently delete—without warning—all your e-mail and account files, and all backups thereof, and remove any remaining e-mail forwards.