Mail Moving to K-State

Incoming & Outgoing

The first week of October 2024 Physics will stop offering its own e-mail service. All mail will be handled through the K-State system. The address "phys.ksu.edu" will still be good for incoming mail, but that mail will go to your K-State inbox. All outgoing mail must originate with the K-State system.

To prepare for this, you should add the K-State mail server to Outlook (or other mail client) if you haven't already (and do so for all your devices). See our video tutorial on how to set up your KSU account in Outlook. K-State has their own E-Mail & Microsoft 365 help & support web resources.

You also have the option of using the K-State webmailer, found at www.k-state.edu, or find the link at the top to the K-State home page.

Mailing Lists

The mailing lists all have the same display names as before but with "Physics_" in front of them. We are now "Physics_PCSCHelp", for example. The actual addresses for the lists have not changed: we are still "pcschelp@phys.ksu.edu". Messages to the all-hands "Physics_All" list go to "physics@phys.ksu.edu".

If you open the Global Address List in desktop Outlook when looking at your K-State account and type in "Physics" you'll see the full set of mailing lists.

As of Tuesday, 08 October, all the lists should be complete and working. Mail to those lists is now properly delivered even if it originated outside of K-State.

Existing Mail

Beginning Wednesday, 02 October 2024, the contents of your Physics inbox will be automatically copied into your K-State inbox *unless you requested otherwise*. No action is required on your part. A few people either simply do not want that or they wish to do it themselves.

As of Tuesday, 08 October, The transfer of old mail from your Physics inbox to your K-State inbox is delayed. The original scheme did not work and the new scheme is slow. Light users may see their old mail migrated as soon as tomorrow; power users with huge inboxes will take more time.

If you do want to do it yourself, you have two general options. The first is to add your K-State account to Outlook (if you haven't already). You can then just drag-and-drop items or folders from teh old Physics inbox to the new K-State inbox. Alternatively, you could make offline archives of your Physics items and then restore from those. Microsoft has text and video tutorials on how to do this.

Contacts & Calendars

Only mail items will be automatically moved: your inbox, sent and deleted mail. Your contacts and calendars are your own responsibility.

As of Friday, 04 October: you should be receiving all mail in your K-State inbox. A few users still do not, but we expect that to resolve itself as Microsoft's servers all get updated. Copying of existing inboxes is delayed, but the new method should also copy your contacts and calendars automatically. Stay tuned.

Copying Contacts

The easy way to copy your contacts is to go to your Physics contact list, highlight the entire set of entries, right-click to choose "copy", then go to the K-State contact folder and "paste" into it. See our short video tutorial on how to do this. You can also just copy the complete contacts folder from the top-level Outlook folder menu for Physics to the top-level of K-State; this creates a copy of of the folder and does not merge into the K-State contacts folder, though. Finally, you could use the Microsoft instructions above to archive your contacts to an external file, then import that file into your K-State contacts folder.

Copying Calendars

Unfortunately copying calendars is not so straightforward. You are best advised to export your calendar from Physics to a file and then import that file into your K-State calendar folder. Follow the instruction in the Microsoft link above, or watch our tutorial video.

The above paragraph assumes you want to move all of your calendar appointments for all time, so as to have a record of your past. If that's irrelevant to you and you only care about the now and the future, your task is simple. Open two instances of Outlook side-by-side on your screen, then just drag-and-drop whatever of this month's appointments you want from one to the other. After that, just use the K-State calendar forever after.

Deadlines

As noted above, mail will begin to be moved from Physics to K-State on Wednesday, 02 October. This should only take a couple of days. Mail service will completely transfer to K-State on Friday, 04 October. The Physics server will remain accessible from with the department network only for two weeks thereafter. That should give everyone adequate time to sort through their stuff and get acquainted with the new system.