About Penn Live
What is Penn Live?
Penn Live is a version of Microsoft Microsoft Live@edu, a state-of-the-art email and communication suite, customized specially for Penn students. When you sign up for Penn Live, it will serve as your Penn email account. Mail sent to your PennDesign email address (e.g. pennkey@design.upenn.edu) will be delivered to your Penn Live account. When you send mail from Penn Live, it will be marked as having been sent from your PennDesign address.
Top
What are the advantages and features of Penn Live?
Penn Live offers significant advantages over traditional email services like Gmail, Hotmail, etc.
Penn Live Mail uses Microsoft Exchange as the backend for its Email, contact, calendar, and task management, all of which can be shared with peers on the Penn Live network. This is the same the same service used by many large organizations for internal and external communications and collaboration. The inbox has a total storage capacity of 10GB. The Calendar is an appointment book allowing other students to see when you are available and propose appointments with you. Contacts is an address book so you can easily store and find contact information and create contact groups. Unlike the public Microsoft Live@edu service, Penn Live has no advertising.
Penn Live is hosted on servers managed by Microsoft to provide the highest levels of reliability and performance.
You can use your Penn Live account to access an extended set of tools offered by Microsoft in their Microsoft Live suite of services including Microsoft Live@edu Messenger, Spaces, Microsoft Live@edu for Mobile, and Sky Drive, a 25 GB storage folder for documents you can share to coordinate both academic and non-academic activities.
Is Penn Live required?
No. You are required to have an email address listed in the Penn Online Directory so we can communicate with you. By creating a Penn Live email account you are given a gse.upenn.edu email address and your address is automatically listed in the Penn Directory. However, if you wish to use another email account then you are required to manually enter that address in the Penn Directory and indicate it as your preferred address.
Penn Directory
Top
Who is eligible for Penn Live?
Penn Live is currently available to new students. We hope to offer the service to returning students in Fall 2009 after a tool is created to transition mail from existing Zimbra accounts. Faculty and staff are not eligible for Penn Live at this time.
Top
What happens when I graduate?
One advantage of Penn Live is that you won't have to abandon or export your email, contacts, or calendar items when you graduate from Penn. You can continue to use Penn Live services after you graduate if you wish. Once you are no longer a full-time student at Penn, the standard Microsoft Live Mail advertising will appear in the interfaces for your email, calendar, and address book but your account will otherwise be unchanged. If you don't log in for 365 days, any mail messages stored on the Penn Live server will be deleted, but the account itself will remain. If you log in after a 365-day lapse, you can resume using email services but all your old messages will be gone.
Top
Do I need to use a Windows PC or Microsoft Internet Explorer?
No. All the Web-based services included in the Penn Live suite can be accessed from Windows, Mac, or Linux using Internet Explorer or Firefox. Safari and other browsers may not support all features at this time.
Simply enter the following address to access your account: http://outlook.com
Top
Can I use an email program like Outlook or Thunderbird to read this account?
Thunderbird and Apple Mail are fully supported. Issues are being worked out with Outlook 2007 and Entourage 2008 that should allow complete access to Email, Calendar, Contacts and Task. See the following for configuration instructions:
Configure Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x
Configure Apple Mail for Mac OS X
Will someone from Microsoft be reading my email?
No, Microsoft will not read your email. See Microsoft’s statements on this at:
http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/fullnotice.aspx
While an automated process indexes your email content for fast search retrieval, no humans at Microsoft will be looking at your email.
Does Penn Live include SPAM filtering?
Yes. When you use Penn Live, incoming mail will be filtered two ways - first with Penn's internal spam filters and then again with the Microsoft filters.
How do I sign-up?
Go here and login with your PennKey and password.
Top
How do I check my mail using Penn Live?
Once you have created your Penn Live account, you can log into Penn Live at:
http://outlook.com
What if I forget my password?
At the login page there will be a link called 'Forgot your password'. Clicking there will begin a process to reset your password. You will need to have either setup an alternate email account so Microsoft can send you information to continue the password reset process, or have chosen a Security Question and answer during the account creation process. If you don't know your Security Question's answer, and didn't setup an alternate email, then you can contact the IT staff at PennDesign using our online form.
Top
