By Simon Isham–

If you’re a student and you automatically forward your email from your Cardmail account to an external account like Gmail or another Office 365 account, you may have missed some important emails today. The emails are not lost; you will simply need to log in to your Cardmail account to view them.

The U of L IT department discovered today that Cardmail no longer has the functionality to reliably automatically forward emails to an external account, though forwarding from one Cardmail.louisville.edu address to another appears to work fine.

Emails sent to students may be returned to the sender account as undeliverable. Students who log into Cardmail will be able to see which emails were not forwarded, because they are marked with the following notice from Microsoft Outlook:

“Your message wasn’t delivered due to a permission or security issue. It may have been rejected by a moderator, the address may only accept email from certain senders, or another restriction may be preventing delivery. For more tips to resolve this issue see DSN code 5.7.1 in Exchange Online. If the problem continues contact your help desk.”

Sociology Ph.D. student told the Cardinal that he notified IT more than a week ago of the issues with email forwarding, but IT did not address the problem publicly until today.

A statement from IT released today to faculty blamed Microsoft for the error, saying the comapny did not notify them that the changes were going to be made.

Today marks the third in a series of delivery errors caused by mandatory upgrades to the U of L email system. Microsoft, the company behind Cardmail, is forcing the university to transition to Exchange Online Protection, its anti-spam and malware program. A recap of the errors so far is below:

June 10: Emails from external sources to faculty and staff may not have reached their intended targets
June 24: Students, faculty and staff experienced delivery delays for several hours
July 9: Emails automatically forwarded from Cardmail accounts to external accounts were rejected as undeliverable

IT requests that faculty who wish to communicate with their students note the following:

  • “If you regularly communicate with students using their CardMail account, your email to them may continue to be rejected until the student takes an action to turn off forwarding. If you are teaching a summer class, please inform your students of this issue and ask them to turn off forwarding in CardMail.
  • “If you have both an Exchange and CardMail account, you will receive a separate communication from IT informing you of the actions you need to take to turn off forwarding.”

IT prescribes the following course of action for students who have forwarding rules enabled and wish to disable them:

  1. Login to CardMail using your full email address, [email protected], and ULink password
  2. Choose one of the following:
  • a. If you had set forwarding to automatically forward your email you must disable it. Click the Settings icon, located in the upper right corner next to your name. Select Options. Under shortcuts to other things you can do click on the Forward your email link. Under forwarding, select the stop forwarding button.
  • b. If you had created a rule to automatically forward your email you must disable it. Click the Settings icon, located in the upper right corner next to your name. Select Options. Under options click on the organize email link. Uncheck the rule you created to forward messages to an external email address.

If you believe you are still having problems with receiving a message, contact the HelpDesk at 852-7997 or [email protected].