A change has been made to the way @ru.ac.za and @campus.ru.ac.za e-mail addresses are routed. For the most part this change will be invisible -- anyone who has a correctly configured e-mail client shouldn't notice anything.
A side effect of the change is that e-mail addresses of the form username+imap@*ru.ac.za (eg mapu001+imap@elephant.ru.ac.za) will no longer work. These addresses should not be in public use -- they existed soley for the purposes of routing mail within Rhodes' mail system. I suspect, however, that a few people may have been using addresses of this form, either accidentally or intentionally. These people will need to update their mail clients (as well as anything else they've configured or told to use these addresses) to use the correct, cannonical form of their e-mail address. In the same way, under the new system, users might see mail failure messages showing username@imap.ru.ac.za as an expanded e-mail address. These addresses are also only used for internal routing and are not considered valid e-mail addresses (in fact, mail addressed to them directly will fail).
This change may cause e-mail addressed to a few legacy e-mail addresses (generally redirects to/from non @ru.ac.za addresses that are over two years old) to fail. If you find such an address, please update your e-mail address book.
One useful addition that's come out of this change is the ability to add random suffixes to your @ru.ac.za or @campus.ru.ac.za e-mail address. You can do this by prefixing the suffix with a plus sign (for example j.blogs+anything.you.want@ru.ac.za for an user whose cannonical e-mail address is j.blogs@ru.ac.za). These suffixes are stripped off during delivery, but are made available in an Envelope-to: header in the message. This will allow you to filter on the full, suffixed form of your e-mail address using Sieve or some other mail filter.
You should be aware that these suffixes only work on your cannonical e-mail address. They do not work on aliases or redirects. This means, for example, that if you got married and changed your e-mail address from your maiden name to your married name, only the married name version would work. In the same way, students who have @ru.ac.za aliases will find that they can only use these suffixes on the @campus.ru.ac.za form of their address. Suffixed e-mail addressed to aliases will fail. You can test whether your e-mail address is cannonical by sending a suffixed message to yourself and checking if it is delivered correctly.
One possible use for suffixes like this is with web-based forms that require an e-mail address. You could, when asked for an e-mail address on www.example.com, give them a (valid) e-mail address of j.blogs+www.example.com@ru.ac.za rather than your usual j.blogs@ru.ac.za. This will enable to track e-mail coming from that website (it'll be addressed to j.blogs+www.example.com@ru.ac.za), and if necessary block SPAM that originates from a specific site using a mail filter.
The use of suffixes on e-mail address is currently considered experimental. Please direct any problems you experience to support@ru.ac.za