Forwarding Mail

INTRO

When you receive a CS Linux account, you're also receiving an email address in the form of yourusername@cs.jhu.edu

You might choose to automatically forward any email you receive at this CS address to some other preferred address. Please realize, you can configure this for your CS email, however...

Consider Not Forwarding Your CS Email To Outside of JHU

Both JHU and WSE IT have highly recommended you do not automatically forward your JHU-based email to outside of JHU. Please refer to WSE's article on redirecting email.

However, for some of you, this might not be feasible. At this time, CS email can be forwarded to both other JHU-based addresses or to sites outside of JHU.

September, 2021: Current Problems Automatically Forwarding Your CS Email -- Some Emails Might Go Missing

Sometime around September, 2021, JHU had updated their DMARC policy in such a way that it has intermittently affected how our CS mail server automatically forwards emails. While incoming email that is automatically forwarded from your CS account should arrive safely to a JHU-based email address, that might not always be the case for emails automatically forwarded to sites outside of JHU, e.g. GMail and others. Those changes at JHU have led to an incompatibility with our mail server system software. Under certain conditions, our mail server software may alter parts of the automatically forwarded message in a way that interferes with the authentication that JHU now adds to those messages. This means that some emails arriving to your CS account, which you have configured to forward automatically to Gmail (or to other non-JHU domains) might get rewritten in such a way that it will get bounced back.

We are currently looking at options to try to overcome this issue. But, for the time being, forwarding your CS email to a domain outside of JHU is at your own risk.

Setting Up Forwarding For Your CS Address

• If you're a CS grad student, professor, researcher, postdoc or staff member, log into one of our Linux Clients on the CS Grad/Research Net and cd to your home directory.

or

• If you're a CS ugrad student, log into one of our Linux Clients on the CS Undergrad Net and cd to your home directory.

then...

• In the top level of your home directory, create a .forward file (don't forget the . ) using an editor.

• Put your preferred email account address as the only line in the .forward file.

• Save changes.

• Run the following command:

chmod 644 .forward

(Again, don't forget the . in .forward )

Now, incoming mail to your CS address should be forwarded to your preferred address.

Things to be Aware of

Unrelated to the earlier description of an email forwarding problem that started Sept, 2021, we have also noticed that Gmail sometimes ignores email messages that have been forwarded back to the account that sent them. Most of the time this isn't usually a problem, but if you're forwarding to a Gmail account and you want to test the forwarding, you should not use the same Gmail account to send your test email. Test it with an email from another source, or have a friend send you an email.

When Your CS Account Is Removed...

IMPORTANT! When your affiliation with the CS department is complete and your CS account is removed (See: CS Account Removal), any email forwarding that you have configured will be removed.

CS will no longer be fowarding emails for those no longer currently affiliated with the CS department.