Mail - UCSB Connect

Owned by Marc Miller
Last updated: May 19, 2023 by Marc Miller
2 min read

The College of Engineering is making use of UCSB Connect (https://connect.ucsb.edu) for mail services as of Summer of 2017 (From June 27-August 29).

The last migration change over happened August 29th, 2017 and we are now fully switched over to UCSB Connect (Google G Suite for Education)

ECI Connect Migration

All ECI Email accounts have moved to Connect - UCSB’s email and calendaring service powered by Google’s G Suite for Education. G Suite for Education is a collection of cloud computing productivity and collaboration software from Google. It includes Google's popular web applications such as Google GMail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs and Sheets. G Suite provides a complete package of communication and collaboration tools suitable for any device.

Why did we migrate to Connect?

  • Ultimately it is a better user experience with additional functionality
  • Google has better spam and virus protection
  • It is protected by legal contract (see here for details) https://www.connect.ucsb.edu/privacy-security/uc-google-contract
    • No scanning of your data for ad generation and no ads are displayed
    • FERPA compliant
    • A large number of ECI accounts previously forwarded mail to external providers and do so generally without protection of a legal contract
  • Additional collaboration functionality and security (MFA is available)
  • Again, it has become the standard collaboration tool used across campus

Who migrated to Connect?

  • Everyone with an ECI account (migration coincided and was coordinated with the ECE Connect migration)
    • All departments and centers that ECI hosted mail for
    • Faculty, staff, and students
  • Mailing lists will eventually be migrated to Google Groups

CoE and Connect Accounts are not the Same

When you create a CoE account, you will by default, automatically get a Connect account if you do not already have one, or an engineering alias added to your Connect account if you already have one.

It is possible to close/expire a CoE account without losing access to Connect assuming you have aliases from a non-CoE source.

CoE accounts and Connect account will by default have the same username, but it is possible to pick different usernames and passwords.

Connect Related Documents