Faculty
Email accounts are disabled three months after leaving the college. Forwarding and auto-reply is disabled one year after leaving. See Automatically forward emails to another account for instructions on how to forward Williams email.
Staff
Email account is disabled on the separation date. Forwarding to a personal account is not allowed. Auto-replies are disabled after three months.
Graduating Seniors
After graduation, students will no longer receive new email in their Williams google (gmail) account. Your Williams account including email and drive files will be deleted on July 1.
See Alumni Email Forwarding for instructions on how to set up email forwarding which allows you to keep your short email address (e.g. abc3@williams.edu) and have it forwarded to a personal account.
Vacation Responder (Auto Reply)
Anyone leaving the college should also set up a Gmail Vacation Responder message to let people (and potential employers) know that your Williams email account will be ending and what new email address they should use to contact you in the future.
See: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/25922
Vacation Responder will continue to work until 45 days after graduation (even though your account is disabled).
An example Vacation Responder message might be:
Thank you for your message. I graduated from Williams College in June 2016. Please send any future correspondence to my new email address: xxxxxx@xxxxx.com.
Options for: Saving/Migrating Email and Google Docs when leaving the college
Option 1 <RECOMMENDED>:
Copy your Williams Gmail and / or Drive files to a personal (non-williams) Gmail account:
Using Google Transfer – Google Transfer can also copy your Drive files over.
Option 2:
An older method of transferring mail from Williams gmail to a personal gmail account is Google fetch in POP mode – Copy-Williams-GAE-to-gmail.pdf
These only transfer your mail, not your calendar, contacts, or documents.
Option 3:
Use Google Takeout to create archives of your mail, calendar, documents and many other types of Google data
- Formats for each of the TakeOut items: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024195
- Google Takeout FAQ: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en
- How to back up and restore Gmail and Calendar files using Google Takeout
Option 4:
Use In App Data Transfer for the following apps only ..
- Email: Gmail accounts offer an option to download all mail to your computer via POP or IMAP access with a local desktop client, such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Contacts: Each email account allows users to export the contacts list in a CSV or vCard format.
- Calendar: Google Calendar offers the ability to download an iCal file to your desktop (limited to calendars that are publicly shared), or you can download all calendars in your ‘My Calendars’ list.
- Drive: Google Drive lets you save your documents, spreadsheets and presentations to your hard drive in various formats.
- More Google applications: You can find additional information about moving data from other Google applications in the Google Accounts Help Center.
Option 5:
Save the email locally:
To save your email locally, you’ll use an email client like Outlook, Mac Mail, Windows Mail or Thunderbird.
Further details are available from the Google Guides
- Set up the email client in IMAP mode
- Incoming server is: imap.gmail.com
- Outgoing (SMTP) server is: smtp.gmail.com
- Incoming Port: 993 SSL
- Outgoing Port: 465 SSL
- Use your username@williams.edu and password
- IMAP mail folders will show all mail that is on the server.
- Create new “local” folders
- Move (drag) email from your network folders to the local folders. The email then exists on your hard drive.
Transferring Ownership of Shared Drive Documents & Folders
- Think about transferring ownership of the Drive documents and folders you have shared that may still need to be used after you leave.
Google provides directions on how to transfer ownership of individual documents. (Note: File ownership can only be transferred to other Williams accounts)