When students graduate or otherwise leave Mines, and when faculty and staff retire or resign from the school, what happens to their email, computer accounts, and electronic files stored on Mines servers? In general, all these services may go away fairly quickly. Thus it is imperative for those leaving the school to transfer email and documents to personal accounts that they themselves control before their transition date.
Student online services (E-mail, MultiPass, Trailhead, Canvas, LonCAPA and so on) may disappear the day a student leaves Mines. In practice, there is usually some time — a few days or weeks — to transfer email to another, personal email account and to back up files stored online. In general, don’t delay; migrate or archive your data as soon as possible before leaving Mines.
Emeritus faculty, and all faculty on transition, are traditionally eligible to retain a courtesy email account and other accounts. (Non-emeritus retired faculty are not eligible.) However, it is a good idea to confirm this with campus Computing, Communications, and Information Technologies staff to avoid any interruption in service. If you are entering transitional retirement, or emeritus status, contact ITS via Mines Help Center (https://helpcenter.mines.edu) to confirm that your accounts should remain in good standing during your transition. Please do so well in advance of your planned transition date.
Other faculty and staff accounts will be removed based on information received from Human Resources when the employee leaves the school. How quickly those accounts will be removed depends on the circumstances of each individual case.
For more on school policies concerning email, please visit HERE.
In sum, all individuals leaving Mines should back up their personal (not school-owned) files — papers, dissertations, data, computer code — to multiple personally owned storage media such as external USB hard drives or USB flash drives, or to personally controlled “cloud” storage. Students, faculty, and staff should export their e-mail to a PST file using Microsoft Outlook for windows. And, of course, all these steps should be taken well before the individual’s final transition date.