U-Mail accounts are eligible for activation about a week after the Registrar's Office has processed your Statement of Intent to Register. UCSB Extension Open Enrollment students are eligible only after the second week of the quarter, which is when we receive registration information from Extension.

Once you're eligible, you can activate your account at our Identity site. To activate your account you'll need either your perm number (for registered students) or your extension student id (for extension students).

If you run into any trouble activating your account click the [help] button for further instructions. ◌

You get your UCSBnetID once you activate your U-Mail account. You'll have to activate your netid and U-Mail account yourself by using our Identity system. ◌

Your password may be reset either by coming in to the U-Mail Help Desk or by using the UCSBnetID Identity service.

Note that new passwords can not be issued over the phone or by e-mail for privacy reasons. ◌

Yes, but only under certain circumstances. For details see the Changing My UCSBnetID page. ◌

Unfortunately, we can't forward mail directed to your address after your account has been closed. ◌

Undergraduate and Graduate accounts will be closed 12 months after you are no longer registered. University Extension accounts expire 30 days after the end of the quarter. You will receive an e-mail notification 30 days before deactivation. Check out our account deactivation info for full details. ◌

U-Mail account services -- and the various electronic services affiliated with your UCSBnetID -- funded primarily by tuition and are meant as a provision to registered students. As such, we cannot grant account extensions ourselves.

If you have some continuing relationship with the University for which you believe your account should remain active, contact the Office of the Registrar (undergrads) or Graduate Division (grad students) and obtain documentation demonstrating this relationship along with the duration for which this relationship will be active. Once you've delivered this documentation to our Help Desk we can process an account extension for the duration specified. ◌

The U-Mail Help Desk can help you out with your UCSBnetID to ensure that it's working properly and that you can login to any netid-supported site. But for specific questions about your BARC account, GOLD services, or any other specifics we can't be of assistance.

You'll have to contact the appropriate office for support of each of those services. ◌

Absolutely not. We support a number of e-mail "client" programs for reading and sending e-mail. In fact, we recommend any of our supported mail clients for day-to-day use of your account -- especially if you have your own computer.

See our Using U-Mail page for more details. ◌

Undergrads have 200 megabytes (MB) of mail storage, which corresponds to approximately 100,000 average-sized messages. Graduate student accounts have a storage limit of 300 MB.

As you approach your mail storage limit your mail client will notify you of your usage. Once you exceed your storage limit you will not receive any further mail until you delete messages from your mail folders. ◌

We frequently see accounts fill up because message with attachments -- both those that you've sent and those you've received -- can be pretty large.

First you'll need to identify which mail folders are using the most storage space. Using the Folders tool in in WebAccess, select all of your mail folders and click "Show Size".

Once you've identified which folders are using the most space, you can use the mailbox view to sort the folder contents by message size. This will allow you to quickly identify the large messages that have the highest impact on your storage use.

Before deleting any large messages, you may want to use your U-Storage account to save any important attachments. ◌

U-Mail supports a number of popular mail client programs -- Such as Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird -- for use with your U-Mail account. See our Using U-Mail page for details.

If you're having trouble using any of these, first check that you've configured them according to the instructions above. Once you've verified they're set up correctly you can ask our help desk if you're still having trouble. ◌

Yes. There are a number of settings you can adjust to optimize our spam filtering rules for your account. Check out our Spam Filtering page for details. ◌

There are a number of reasons you may not receive a e-mail message. Before contacting our help desk you might first check the following:

1. That your correspondent has the correct e-mail address. If they have a typographical error in your e-mail address they will receive a "bounce" notification letting them know this.
2. That the message hasn't ended up in your junk-mail folder. U-Mail employs sophisticated spam filtering technologies, but they're not perfect. As such, legitimate e-mail may end up in your junk-mail. See our Spam Filtering page for details.
3. We employ a technology called greylisting to further limit spammers ability to abuse your e-mail. For first-time correspondents, greylisting introduces a short delay (typically less than 15 minutes) before the message arrives in your inbox. So if you're expecting a message from a new correspondent, be aware that it may not arrive instantaneously.

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You can export mailboxes out of your account using the "Download Folders" tool in the WebAccess webmail service. For details, see our page on Saving Mail. ◌

Yes. Most e-mail systems limit the size of a message. On U-Mail this limit is 25 megabytes (MB), which is sufficiently large enough to handle normal e-mail needs. If you need to share files that exceed 25 MB in size we recommend that you post it on your U-Web Site and e-mail your collaborators the web site location. ◌

You can update your forwarding record using our the Mail Forwarding tool within WebAccess. ◌

The "Mail Preview" feature that displays snippets of each message when you hover the mouse over it tends make the mailbox display somewhat less snappy. If you don't use this function, you can disable Mail Previews under the WebAccess Options, which will decrease the time it takes to display your mailbox. ◌

Once you've created the addresses you'd like in your group, you'll want to create a new "Contact List".

Select each of the addresses you want in your group and choose "Create a new contact list in My Address Book" from the drop-down menu, and click the "Add" link. You'll be prompted to name your new contact list.

If you'd like to add subsequent entries to your list you can now select it under the drop-down menu, and add entries to this list directly. ◌

Rather than using the main window in WebAccess to compose messages, you can opt to have the "New Message" page pop-out as it's own window.

To enable this feature, select "Compose messages in a separate window?" in the Message Composition options. ◌

You can sort your messages either by order received, date sent, sender, subject, message size, or by conversation thread. In your mailbox display, just click the column header to sort your mailbox by that column. ◌

Check out the "Mail Filters" feature under Account Tools.

Mail Filtering will automatically process certain actions -- such as delete, move, copy, etc. -- based on the message content. So you can, for instance, delete all messages with a particular subject or move all messages from a friend into a certain folder.

Mail Filters can be configured to run every time you log in or any time you select a particular folder. ◌