Academic Computing Services

Reasons Accounts May Be Suspended or Closed

This article is composed of the following sections:

• Reasons accounts may be suspended or closed
• Things to do before your accounts close

ACS personal and course accounts may be suspended or closed for various reasons. The most common are listed below.

UCSD students are eligible to use ACS accounts, labs, and printing services only during quarters for which they are enrolled in classes and have paid student fees. ACS uses data obtained regularly from the Registrar to determine whether student accounts should remain open.

Course-specific accounts

Course-specific accounts are closed and removed from ACS systems immediately after the end of each quarter. E-mail accounts for students who do not pre-register for the following quarter are usually closed within two weeks of the end of each quarter.

Leave of absence/not enrolled

Accounts will be suspended if a student takes a leave of absence from the University for a period of time. If your account is suspended due to non-enrollment, once you have enrolled for courses, your account should be working again by the following Monday.

EAP/OAP

Students participating in the Education Abroad Program (EAP) are considered enrolled in University of California courses, and thus their accounts remain active. In contrast, Opportunities Abroad Program (OAP) participants, may not necessarily be doing classwork for UC credit, so their accounts are normally suspended as though they were taking a leave of absence, as discussed above. Once an OAP student returns to UCSD and registers for classes as usual, his/her account will become active once again.

Graduation

Beginning Spring quarter 2001 ACS instituted a program to automatically extend the closing date of accounts belonging to students who applied to graduate. Students who have applied to graduate are sent an e-mail notice with details about the extension which is for approximately 60 days.

Security

Accounts which are found to have crackable passwords or which appear to have been compromised are suspended to protect files and privacy.

Out of funds

Each user's account has a limited amount of resources, measured in "computing units", for each week. When this allocation is exhausted, a user cannot log back in to his/her account, nor check email with a popmail program (Eudora, MS Outlook, etc.) until the account's units are refreshed. This occurs every Friday morning. If you have used up your allocation before the end of the week, then, you will have to wait until Friday to be able to log back in. See help balance for details about checking your computing unit balance.

ACT (formerly Network Operations) will forward email sent to an @ucsd.edu address for up to one year after the account is suspended/terminated. Use the mailbox change utility to direct your @ucsd.edu address to a new mail service destination.

Things to do before your accounts close

If you plan to graduate, take a leave, or withdraw from the university, please take the following steps beforehand to preserve your valued computer files and to minimize the risk of missing e-mail sent to you:

1) Arrange for a new e-mail account through the UCSD Alumni Association, an off-campus ISP, an employer, or a new educational institution.

If your status changes from student to UCSD staff or alumni you will need to obtain a new e-mail account on a system other than an ACS student system.

If you become UCSD staff, check with your department to see if they will be providing you with e-mail service. If not, you can obtain a free UCSD E-mail Address.

Alumni Association members please see ACT (formerly Network Operations) Alumni E-Mail Frequently Asked Questions for information about available services.

2) Redirect mail addressed to <username>@ucsd.edu to your new account. See ACT (formerly Network Operations)' mailbox change utility for details.

When you leave the University, ACT (formerly Network Operations) will continue to forward e-mail sent to your @ucsd.edu address for up to one year.

If you become UCSD staff, ACT (formerly Network Operations) will retain your @ucsd.edu mail address record beyond the one-year mark, assuming that you provided your Social Security Number to the University as a student. Note, you still need to obtain a new account on a non-student mail server as indicated in step (1).

Alumni Association members, again please see Alumni E-Mail Frequently Asked Questions

3) Move copies of your important computer files to portable media, your home computer or another computer account. See Transferring Files).

4) Ask ACS to delete your account from student/instructional systems. To do this login to your account BEFORE IT CLOSES and send a message to acs-consult@ucsd.edu requesting that your account be deleted. Here's why:

Since ACS typically suspends accounts for two quarters before actually deleting them, there's the potential problem that mail messages may accumulate on the suspended account. That's a bad situation in two ways. First, you will not be able to access the messages, and second the sender assumes you received them. Part of the solution is to arrange for e-mail service on another host and redirect your username@ucsd.edu address to the new destination (as described above). However, that is not a complete solution. If for example your ACS student e-mail account was on sdcc13 and someone sent mail directly to sdcc13 using an address of the form username@SDCC13.ucsd.edu, the message would still end up stranded on your suspended account on sdcc13. Unfortunately ".forward" files do not function on suspended accounts. So the best solution in this case would be to have the account deleted from sdcc13. That way messages would not become stranded; anyone who sent directly to sdcc13 would receive returned mail and they would know that you did not receive the message.

In the e-mail to acs-consult@ucsd.edu you can simply say, "I have graduated. Please delete my student e-mail account, jsmith@sdcc13."

IMPORTANT: SEND THE REQUEST FROM YOUR UCSD ACCOUNT so ACS can be sure the message is from the actual owner of the account. Exception, if your campus name@ucsd.edu address is directed to an off-campus address, it will suffice to send the request from that off-campus address.