The course of history is littered with examples of newer, faster, better, superior technologies arising and surpassing their contemporaries. Communication services are no different. A few hundred years ago, messages were being delivered by men on the backs of ponies. Soon, this changed to trains, then motorized vehicles, then jet airliners. But today, I do not even have to write out my letter and give the post office the money for a stamp, because I have e-mail.

All students at NC State are provided with a university email account and access to Oracle™ Calendar, an online calendar program.

Email

Something about Cyrus IMAP… Visit our Email 101 site. Beware of Google docs phishing emails and websites As a user of Google Apps @ NC State, you should be aware that online hackers have created phishing emails and fake Google Docs login pages to obtain your login credentials. You may have already received email that appears to come from another @ncsu.edu account with a message similar to: “Please view the document I uploaded for you using Google docs. Click here and sign in with your email to view the document.” Be very careful when entering your userid and password, if prompted, to access a shared Google doc. As with most phishing attacks, the email message will appear to be an authentic Google message and usually will indicate that the document is very important and that you should act quickly. Here are ways to identify phishing email and websites.  

• Use your mouse to hover over the link in the email to see if it starts with https://. Fake websites do not use encryption and their URLs begin with http://.

• Hover over the link in the email to see where the URL goes? Documents shared with you by others at the university will have a URL that begins with https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/document.
  • Analyze the URL by finding the first forward slash (/) after the https//: and verifying that docs.google.com is to the left of that forward slash as illustrated above. Phishing sites may copy the /a/ncsu.edu to the right of the first forward slash, but willl have other data to the left of the slash like http://due.iwebs.ws/a/ncsu.edu/document.
• If you are already logged in to Google and you are prompted to log in again to access the shared Google doc, that’s another clue that this may be be a phishing attempt. The hackers are hoping you have forgotten that you were already logged in, as it may have been a substantial amount time since you did. You should then look at the provided URL. You will see that the URL is not a Google URL, as described above.
• Be careful and always check the URL of the Google doc before entering your userid and password, if applicable, to verify that you are signing in to docs.google.com.

Mailing Lists

In the ECE Department, everyone has their own mailing lists. All Undergraduate Students are automatically subscribed to the ece-ugrad@lists.ncsu.edu mailing list. All information sent via this list is directed to the student’s official NCSU email address (ie. userid@ncsu.edu Email addresses outside the university will not be used for this purpose. Subscription to this mailing list is mandatory for students as long as they remain in the ECE department and serves as a means of communicating official departmental information. Although undergraduate students are subscribed to this list, posting to this list is restricted to the ECE Administration only. Similar to the mailing list used for undergraduate students within the ECE department, graduate students are also automatically subscribed to their own mailing list: ece-grad@lists.ncsu.edu. All of the restrictions mentioned above apply to this list as well. In addition to the mailing lists provided to students within the department, faculty and staff mailing lists are also available (including lists focused on individual areas of research). For more information on these lists (including how to subscribe), please visit http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/tools/mailclerk. IEEESB provides an additional (optional) mailing list to students who are interested in joining. Seehttp://students.engr.ncsu.edu/ieee/ for additional information. If you are associated with the ECE department and wish to create a mailing list, please contact ece-webmaster@ncsu.edu.

Calendar

As of Fall 2006, all students will have access to Oracle Calendar, a valuable time management tool that will allow enhancements in productivity and communication. This program will be accessible to students online, as well as on Windows and *nix workstations (i.e.. Sun Solaris and Linux) in the near future. Online instruction and courses are available, including information for PDA and pocket calendar software. For updates and additional information, please visit http://brickyard.ncsu.edu/ or visit our comprehensive Calendar 101 page.

Upload class schedules

With a few quick clicks from the Enrollment Wizard in the MyPack Portal, students can now load a single class section — or their entire class schedule — into their Google Apps @ NC State calendars.Faculty are encouraged to share this information with their students and direct them to Registration and Records’ step-by-step instructions, complete with screen captures, at Syncing your class schedule to Google Calendar.