Gmail as a CS Mail Client

Occasionally, people in the department want to have email from their CS email account appear in their Gmail account.

We do not recommend doing this, and we cannot offer support for people who choose to do it anyway. Every approach involves tradeoffs that can be mitigated by using a mobile or desktop mail client or our webmail.

Especially if you are a member of the CS faculty, we strongly recommend that you conduct all CS-related business using either your CS email address or your JHU email address. Using a non-CS, non-JHU email address makes it much easier for malicious actors to attempt to impersonate you over email with your colleagues and students. (For example, if you've been in the department for some time, you've probably received an email from a random Gmail account fraudulently claiming to be Randal Burns and asking you to buy gift cards for him. The attacker can fake Randal's name on the email, but they cannot fake a cs.jhu.edu email address.)

Nevertheless, below are some resources we've found for people who want to do this despite the above advice.

Gmail as an IMAP Client

Note: The principal drawback of this approach is that your CS account password will be stored on Google's servers. This increases the risk of your account being compromised.

Google has a support article “Add another email account on your computer”. You can follow its instructions to have Gmail fetch mail from your CS account, using the appropriate CS mail client instructions. As with any mail client, we recommend using IMAP, not POP, to retrieve your email.

You should also follow Gmail's instructions for sending emails from a different address and information from our mail sending instructions so that emails relating to CS can go out with your CS email address attached. If you do this, make sure your email is going through the CS mail server, after a login with your CS account. If you don't do that, other mail servers will reject your email as fraudulent.

Forwarding Your Email to Gmail

Although it is possible to forward your CS mail to Gmail using our mail forwarding instructions, you should not do this. Mail servers use a number of mechanisms to verify the authenticity of email, and simple mail forwarding often causes the forwarded messages to fail that validation. If you simply forward your CS email to Gmail, you will lose an indeterminate number of emails sent to you by non-CS people.