Welcome!

This is a temporary blog setup to inform our VCOM user base of any problems that may affect access to VCOM email during our upgrades.  At this time there are no announcements that our users need to be aware of.

I wanted to take a moment and make you all aware that there MAY be some temporary disruption in email services starting this Friday, the 1^st of July.  You may have already noticed a new page when you visit mail.vcom.vt.edu.  We are in the process of upgrading our email servers to offer better access and more robust features.  Our hope is that this will be transparent to most users.  The settings that will change shortly will take a little while to propagate through the network, as such the best course of action may be to wait until Saturday should you have issues accessing your e-mail Friday evening.  Our admins at tech will be doing many things to the servers this weekend so there may be short sporadic outages.

I will be monitoring the status of email systems over the weekend and doing everything that I can to ensure access remains as easy as possible.

VCOM Faculty and Staff:

The machines that we have issued you should be configured in a way that the changes made will not affect your access.  You may receive a security alert when opening Outlook.  Server names such as elledan.vcom.edu, elrohi.vcom.edu, elros.vcom.edu are all fine and part of our system.  Please answer yes to these security alerts.     

For our users that use the Outlook Web Access:

The URL for this will remain the same, mail.vcom.vt.edu for now.  This will be phased out in favor of mail.vcom.edu.  Both URLs should function but mail.vcom.edu will be the one for future use.  Please adjust your shortcuts appropriately. 

For our users that use Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010:

If we configured this for you, or you followed our guidance when setting up an exchange account then you should not experience any problems.  You may receive a security alert when opening Outlook.  Server names such as elledan.vcom.edu, elrohi.vcom.edu, elros.vcom.edu are all fine and part of our system.  Please answer yes to these security alerts.   

For users that use other mail clients that access via POP and IMAP protocols:

Please use mail.vcom.edu for incoming and outgoing mail servers.  Port settings should remain the same. 

For smart phone users:

If your phone is setup to use ActiveSync or access via exchange servers you may need to update the exchange server to point to mail.vcom.edu or elledan.vcom.edu.  Phones can be a big question mark as we don’t have every different type out there to test.  Please be patient with problems with smart phones.  In most cases the best way to restore functionality is to remove the account and re-add it.    

Certificate warnings:

These may linger as issues for a little while.  If you see a security certificate warning, continue through it and it should be fine.

General troubleshooting advice:

If you have connection issues reboot your computer.

If you still have problems hit Windows + R, type cmd then hit enter, then in the black box that appears type ipconfig /flushdns then hit enter.