If you use a Yahoo or AOL email account or know someone who does, please be aware that due to recent changes in those services it may be impossible to send between those services and Rutgers email addresses (as well as many others). The messages will simply disappear.
This is a complicated issue. For a description of the full problem see this TidBITS article, but briefly put, Yahoo and AOL may reject any email that is forwarded or redistributed through a third party. That affects two things at Rutgers:
- @rutgers.edu email, which automatically forwards all messages to wherever the addressee wants
- mailing lists (such as "listserv" and "mailman", but also may include Rutgers "RAMS" service and possibly course systems like Sakai, eCollege and Blackboard). Mailing lists give you a single address, when you send a message to that address it gets redistributed to a larger group of people, such as the students in your course.
If you use AOL or Yahoo, and use those to send email to an "@rutgers.edu" address, it may not work (it depends on several factors that are difficult to predict. I did some brief testing, messages sent from Yahoo to my @rutgers.edu address did go through, but messages sent from AOL were never delivered).
If you use other email services (Gmail, Scarletmail, Outlook.com, etc), and have your "@rutgers.edu" messages forwarded there, be aware that anyone who uses Yahoo or AOL may not be able to send you messages if they use your "@rutgers.edu" address.
Anyone who uses AOL or Yahoo email should check their NetID Email Settings to make sure that their "mail delivery address" is set to use some other mail service (Scarletmail is a good choice). You should also change your "official Rutgers email address" to anything other than Yahoo or AOL, since that will be used for Rutgers mailing lists.
If you use the Sakai "email archive" tool or RAMS to communicate with your students, you should check your REGIS roster to see if any of your students use AOL or Yahoo as their email address. You may need to ask those students to switch to Scarletmail or any other email service. Or you can send copies of your messages to those students individually.
This issue must be fixed by Yahoo and AOL, there's nothing anyone else can do (and it appears that Yahoo may already be taking some steps to correct the problem).
[edited to remove an inaccuracy]
