UC Davis Email is handled differently for faculty/staff and students. Currently enrolled undergrad and graduate students at UC Davis are on Google Apps. Excluded from this are open campus / extension students, med students, faculty, and staff users who remain on the older Geckomail system.

Users on the new system have their email addresses and the Google Apps account for life. The new accounts have approximately 7.3 GB of storage.

UCD Gmail (aka DavisMail)

DavisMail can be accessed in a few ways:

In 2009-2010, faculty and staff began a pilot to test Gmail. After the pilot, a decision was made not to outsource faculty and staff email to Google. There were two reasons given: 1) there were concerns that outsourcing email may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy, and 2) many faculty expressed concern that Google had not demonstrated a commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications. Information Week and other outlets covered the story with heated discussion.

UCD Geckomail

Students today will never know the beautiful geckomail interface. Sometimes it's fast. Sometimes it's slow. Sometimes it's filled with thousands of spam email messages. Sometimes SpamAssassin targets those little buggers and creates a delightful email experience. Regardless of the quirks, a UC Davis email account provides a convenient way for students and teachers to communicate with each other. Currently these email accounts provide an astonishingly low 60MB of storage. This 60MB quota includes spam, so make sure to delete your spam or mail to you will start bounding.

Most email servers have a postmaster, which is responsible for keeping the service running smoothly. Davis, on the other hand, has the self-proclaimed "Post Mistress," Debbie Edwards.

If you have a UC Davis geckomail email account, you can check your email a few ways:

  • Geckomail is the University's web-based email client, available at http://geckomail.ucdavis.edu. It's a little slow, and doesn't have a lot of features, but it's terribly easy to access.
  • Through MyUCDavis (which actually just displays geckomail in a HTML frame)
  • via IMAP or POP access with an email client like Outlook or Evolution or Thunderbird http://xbase.ucdavis.edu/1881
  • Forward it to Gmail, Hotmail, etc. and you can check it in your own inbox without logging into MyUCDavis.

You can check http://status.ucdavis.edu/ to check system status.

Note that if you are on the old geckomail system, email address gets turned off 60 days after you graduate or get disenrolled, however you can get it forwarded elsewhere. (Persons on the new Davismail keep their accounts for life.)

Because the geckomail email accounts have such a low storage limit, some people choose to either POP their email (download it to their computer and delete it off the server), or to forward it to another account. You can forward your email to a different account using this page, Gmail or some other web service is a good idea because you'll probably want to check it from many campus computer labs.

Anyone affiliated with UCD can create an email list to coordinate groups of people, but it's subject to approval by the administrators. See http://listproc.ucdavis.edu for details. You can also add and remove yourself from other groups (tired of departmental spam?).

You need to have a UCD email to join the UC Davis network on Facebook, which is a useful place for wasting your study time.

Persons on Davismail no longer need to do this, but if you are on the older geckomail system and would like to keep using your @ucdavis.edu email address after you are no longer at UCD, check out the uc davis email forwarding service.

email.ucdavis.edu — Central location for more information.

xbase.ucdavis.edu — Knowledge base with Email how-to articles.

Article from The California Aggie about the campus considering Gmail.

Comments:

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2006-09-22 21:03:56   Ok Tech peeps, I cant figure this one out, is it possible to set up blackberry/motorola q service for UCD email? If not I guess i can forward to gmail but its just easier to have seperate servers and adresses. —KyleFlick

2009-05-06 18:57:47   Oddly enough, I still have to use Geckomail. DavisMail isn't accessible to me yet; I've no token to even enable it. I'm transferring this fall quarter so perhaps I'm not completely integrated. The FAQ says: "After the fall migration is complete, new students will automatically receive a DavisMail account when they become a UC Davis student." Perhaps I'm not a genuine UCD student yet... —RyanMikulovsky

2010-05-03 22:53:05   The new DavisMail comes with all the standard goodies from Google Apps. I’ve been using Calendar as a to-do list and for registrar reminders for a while now; right now I’m collaborating with classmates on a study guide in Google Docs. Great stuff. —EBT

2010-05-03 22:58:38   By and large it works, although my wife had problems viewing a google doc spreadsheet sent out by a classmate a couple of months ago. It worked fine using my gmail account, but not on her davismail—on her computer, or on either of mine. I've heard of a couple of other problems along those lines. Maybe they've fixed it up a bit in the last couple of months. And it seems to be limited to pretty isolated events, so generally not that big a deal. —TomGarberson

2012-06-24 13:37:12   So our @ucdavis.edu accounts stay active even after graduation? —MattCorey

  • Kind of. The article above: Note that if you are on the old geckomail system, email address gets turned off 60 days after you graduate or get disenrolled, however you can get it forwarded elsewhere. (Persons on the new Davismail keep their accounts for life.) I graduated in 2006, and filled out some sort of online form somewhere. You might want to look into that ASAP in cause it's not automatic with the Davismail system. I still can (and do) receive emails to my old @ucdavis.edu account. They're forwarded to my gmail account. But you can't send email from that address for much longer, post graduation. -ES
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