Flinders Authentication Name (FAN)

Your Flinders Authentication Name (FAN) and its associated password is your key to computer-based resources and services at Flinders University.

Your FAN gives you access to a number of university electronic services, including iFlinders, electronic mail , network services and course material.

If you are a new student you will need to obtain Your FAN and activate Your FAN password before accessing any of the above systems and in order to enrol.

For more information visit the FAN home.

University email

The University provides a staff email account for each member of general and academic staff, and every research postgraduate student. In addition, email accounts are provided for those with academic status and for members of University affiliated organisations. All email accounts are generated automatically as staff members accept employment with the University and as students become enrolled.

If you are a new staff member you will need to activate Your FAN before you can access email.

Outlook - ISD preferred email client

Microsoft Outlook is the preferred email client for ISD supported customers. Microsoft Entourage is preferred for Mac users.

Outlook and Entourage must connect to the Microsoft remote hosted Exchange service to down and up load email. To connect to the Exchange server see these instructions:

Email quota information

Every staff account in the remote hosted Exchange server has a hard quota of 25GB, but we strongly recommend you keep your mailbox much smaller than that. Exchange recognizes the size of your entire mail store, whether one or many email folders, and including deleted items and sent items. For performance reasons, Microsoft does not recommend mailboxes larger than 2GB.

Whenever you log on to Outlook/Entourage at a new computer (eg at a different location, a new laptop, or an upgraded computer) Exchange will set out to re-synchronise the email database which will involve downloading the contents of your mailbox to the new system. For very large mailboxes this may take from tens of minutes, to hours.

There are limits on the sizes of emails and attachments that can be processed by the Exchange mail service. The message size total is 30MB including the email and any attachments. The individual attachment file size limit is 26MB (limit set on ForeFront AntiVirus by default). The file size is considered "pre-compression" because the AntiVirus extracts all zipped files to scan them.

Supported email clients

Live@edu is the email system supported for student email.

Supported clients for staff access to the remote hosted Exchange service are:

  • Microsoft Outlook
  • Microsoft Entourage
  • Outlook Web Access
  • iPhone

Modern versions of Apple mail will work with Exchange, but email, calendaring and contacts are separate applications so do not feature the same degree of integration. Microsoft has now released Outlook 2011 for Mac and it is available for download to University computers, but is not supported by Microsoft for access to Exchange. There is no application for automatic configuration and sign-in.

Information on connecting these clients to the Exchange server is provided on the tips and tricks page of the Exchange Implementation Project.

About email services

Staff and Research Postgraduate Students

The University provides a staff email account for each member of general and academic staff, and every research postgraduate student. In addition, email accounts are provided for those with academic status and for members of University affiliated organisations. All email accounts are generated automatically as staff members accept employment with the University and as students become enrolled.

Email aliases are automatically generated for all staff. Postgraduate students can apply, by an email message to FlinDirect to have an email alias created for them. These aliases are in the form: preferredfirstname.lastname@flinders.edu.au (eg fred.bloggs@flinders.edu.au), and on campus email can be sent without the trailing (@flinders.edu.au).

A web based email package, Outlook Web Access (OWA), is available for those occasions when you travel. Your email address to log in to OWA is Your FAN@flinders.edu.au (eg abcd1234@flinders.edu.au). There is also a searchable list of staff names and email addresses available on the Flinders website.

Undergraduate Students, Honours Students and Coursework Postgraduate Students

The University provides an email account for these students and these are generated automatically at enrolment. A web based email package (live@edu) is available for your use. Student email addresses are in the form: abcd1234@flinders.edu.au where abcd1234 is Your FAN.

Saving your email when you leave the University

If you wish to save your email when you leave the University, it is your responsibility to download it to your personal computer. Your email client program provides options to export or backup emails to a local file. It is not possible to back up from Live@edu or OWA.

To configure an email client to access the Flinders email servers (not the Exchange service), you will require the following information:

  • Your name
  • Your FAN
  • Your email password
  • Incoming mail server - post.flinders.edu.au
  • Server Type - POP
  • Security settings on incoming email server - SSL
  • Outgoing mail server - your ISP's mail server address (available from your ISP)
  • Security settings on outgoing email server - None

Instructions on how to set up Outlook on your home computer to connect to the remote hosted Exchange server can be found here.