Email Migration

Effective Date: Ongoing

Your new ODU email address is the same as your legacy EVMS address, replacing @evms.edu with @odu.edu. Your ODU address has already been established, but until your workstation migration date, any messages addressed to you@odu.edu are being forwarded to your EVMS mailbox.

What’s changing:

  • On your migration date, Outlook will be set up with your ODU mailbox, and messages that you send will come from you@odu.edu.
  • Your ODU mailbox has automatic retention, where emails in your inbox and other folders will be automatically deleted one year from the date they were received unless they are tagged with an individual retention policy or moved to a folder with a different retention policy. Learn more about ODU’s email retention policies. 
  • You will have a one-year grace period – until July 1, 2025 – to tag messages or folders that need to be retained with retention tags. Until then, automatic deletion will only apply to sent items. 

What’s staying the same:

  • You will continue to receive messages that are addressed to you@evms.edu; messages will be forwarded to your ODU mailbox. There is no plan to remove this forward. 
  • You will not lose any saved messages. All of your saved messages, including .pst files on your hard drive, will be migrated to your ODU mailbox automatically within a few days of your migration date.
  • You can continue to use your EVMS email address as a username with any third-party vendors and legacy EVMS services.

To do:

  • Please take some time to clean out any emails you no longer need.
  • On July 1, you should change your email signature to reflect your position as an ODU employee, regardless of whether you are communicating from your ODU or EVMS mailbox.


 


Email Migration Process (Faculty/Staff)

Your mailbox will be moved to ODU's servers on the night that your computer is reconfigured (see tentative migration schedule at the bottom of this page). When you launch Outlook the next morning, you will log in with your ODU email address and MIDAS password, and Outlook will go through a setup phase, importing your data and configuring itself for use. Your emails will automatically be moved for you. Any emails currently stored locally on your workstation will be available in a newly created folder in your mailbox within 7 days (they may not be available right away, but they will show up within a week).

Access your ODU email account in one of three ways (log in with your ODU email address and password):

  • In Outlook on your ODU-managed computer
  • Online at outlook.odu.edu from any device
  • On a personal phone or tablet with mobile device management enabled (If you previously accessed email on a personal mobile device, you'll need to set those devices up again. You can follow the steps here or bring them in on the day of your migration and a technician will be available to help.)

All existing messages in your EVMS mailbox will be imported into your ODU mailbox. Any emails currently stored locally on your workstation will be imported into a newly created folder in your mailbox within 7 days (not right away, but within a week).

In most cases, entire departments will be migrated at one time to minimize issues that result from working in two separate environments, but larger departments might span a couple of days. In this case, you may find that you are unable to access a mailbox or calendar that is shared with you until it is also migrated. We will coordinate the migration of shared mailboxes/calendars with their owners.

  • All of your Office files, Outlook calendar events and Outlook contacts will remain unchanged.
  • If you backed up your email signatures and Office templates, these settings can be restored.
  • Outlook reader pane views and recent document lists cannot be migrated and will have to be reset.

Email Retention

ODU's email policy is to retain messages only as long as necessary for business purposes. Emails in your inbox will be automatically deleted after one year unless they are tagged with an individual retention policy or moved to a folder with a different retention policy.

Learn more about ODU's email and messaging, including retention policies.
 


Email Migration Process (Students)

Student ODU email accounts are active. Please start using your ODU email account to read, reply to, and send all email communication.

To access your ODU email: 

  • Online: Go to outlook.odu.edu and log in with your ODU email address and password (the same as your EVMS password).
  • On a mobile device: To access email on your phone or tablet, you need to enroll your device in Intune mobile device management. You can follow the instructions here, or contact the ITS Help Desk for assistance.

Beginning July 3: All email messages addressed to ___@evms.edu are forwarded to ___@odu.edu. Messages will be forwarded indefinitely; you will continue to receive all mail addressed to evms.edu for as long as you remain a part of Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University.

Between July 3 and July 15: Entire EVMS mailboxes, including all saved messages, are migrated (copied) to ODU mailboxes. This happens on a rolling basis. We can’t give an exact date, but you’ll know migration has occurred when you see all existing EVMS messages in your ODU mailbox.

By July 15: All official communication and important school-related information will ONLY be sent to a student's ODU address. Once EVMS mailboxes have been migrated, new messages sent from or stored in EVMS mailboxes will not be copied to ODU mailboxes and will be lost when EVMS student mailboxes are deleted on September 1.