Richland Parish Schools Email System Changes and Status

Important!
The Richland Parish School Board will not need to know your email password to complete this operation. Please treat any requests for your account information as a scam!

Background

Due to repeated problems with our existing email systems during the 2024-2025 school year, we have elected to abandon the systems that were in use and migrate all employee and student accounts over to Google Mail.

What Will NOT Change

  • Even though we will be utilizing Google Mail, all email addresses will remain unchanged. Ex: example@richland.k12.la.us or example@students.richland.k12.la.us

What Will Change

  • The Richland Parish Schools email web interfaces for both employees and students will be disabled.
  • All external access to the email system (Example: iPhone’s Mail app, Microsoft Outlook, etc.) will either cease to work, or will complain about an incorrect password. Users wanting access on their cell phones will need to install the Gmail app, or use the web interface.
  • The “Email Login” link on the Richland Parish Schools homepage will be redirected to a temporary web page notifying users of the change with a link to the where to log into Google Mail, and a link to this page.
  • You will be using your Google password for email after the migration. If you do not know your Google password, please report to your school principal/supervisor and have them reach out to Daniel to have the password reset. This step is done to help verify the identity of the person requesting the password reset.
  • 99.9% of all existing emails in the old system will be migrated to Google, but the transfer will take several weeks to complete.
    • Drafts without any TO, CC, or BCC entries will not be transferred.
    • Any emails that slipped through in the past containing a virus will not be transferred.
    • Any excessively large emails may not be transferred. We will review the logs after migration to determine what to do with these.
    • Sadly, the Google Mail spam filter will not be re-analyzing the existing emails. If your account looked like a disaster before, then it will afterwards too.
  • There is not a straightforward process for migrating the existing address books and signatures into the Google system from our old system; however, an attempt is being made to make this happen. In the event that the transfer of this information proves to be too difficult, an email will be sent to those who have address book entries and/or signatures showing the contents of what it contained so that the data can be re-entered if needed.

Current Status:

  • COMPLETED: The Google Mail interface for students at Delhi High School, Mangham High School, and Rayville High School have been enabled.
  • COMPLETED: The old student email system has been disabled and email routing rules have been changed over to Google.
  • COMPLETED: The old emails in the student accounts have been successfully migrated to Google.
  • COMPLETED: The Google Mail interface has been enabled for employees; however, it should not be used at this time other than just simply looking over the interface. (This is a prerequisite for email migration.)
  • COMPLETED: We attempted to identify employees who would most likely need access to their existing emails, created a snapshot of their emails on Friday, June 27th, and have began the process of syncing those emails before the switchover.
    • This includes the following employees:
      • All central office supervisors, managers, and the superintendent.
      • All central office secretaries, bookkeepers, and assistants.
      • School principals, assistant principals, clerks, and counselors.
  • RESEARCHING: Contacts and Signatures migration.
  • COMPLETED (but untested): Re-creation of mailing lists. Note that this task is not dependent on any other task and may be processed at any time as time permits.
  • COMPLETED: The official switchover to Google for email. [Note: This is currently being planned for over the July 4th holiday weekend and may happen as early as July 3rd.]
  • COMPLETED: Re-synchronize the accounts identified earlier to transfer any emails that were received after the snapshot was taken. This process will start as soon as the switchover is completed and may take several days.
  • IN-PROGRESS: Synchronize all remaining old emails. An attempt will be made to try to prioritize by job function. If someone needs to be bumped up, please email dhogan@richland.k12.la.us. Reminder that only up to 100 accounts can be processed per batch, with each batch potentially taking up to a week.