Q: How can I forward my e-mail to another address?

Applies to new mail only!
This only applies to incoming mail being received at your MIT e-mail address. This procedure will not have any effect on mail that has already been received on your Athena account or on the IMAP mail servers.

Not responsible for lost email
Once mail leaves the MIT servers, we have no way of knowing if it was successfully delivered, nor do we have any way of determining what happened to a message that was not delivered. Please be aware of the risks involved in forwarding your e-mail to another address.

Context

There are two ways to forward your incoming MIT e-mail to another address: forwarding and splitting. When you forward your mail, any mail coming to your MIT account will be immediately redirected to the address you specify, and will not show up in your IMAP inbox or MIT webmail. When you split your e-mail, a copy is made of all incoming e-mail. One copy will appear in your MIT IMAP inbox as before, and another copy will be sent to the address you specify.

Answer

1. Log into Athena

The forwarding and splitting commands are available from the Athena command prompt. You need to log into Athena either on an MIT Athena workstation or using ssh or telnet to athena.dialup.mit.edu. You can also go to http://athena.dialup.mit.edu/ which will allow you to start up an ssh connection using a Java applet in a web page.

2.a. Forwarding your mail

If you want to forward all your mail to a non-MIT.EDU address (for example, if you want to get all your MIT mail sent to your MEDIA.MIT.EDU, aol.com, or gmail.com address instead), you should type the below at your Athena command prompt, usually athena%:

athena% chpobox -s joeuser@example.com

Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for joeuser@example.com.

It will take up to three hours for the forwarding to take effect. In the meantime, you should continue checking your MIT e-mail account.

Carefully check your email address
The chpobox command does not actually check to see if the address you specify exists or is correct, only if it is entered in a correct format of username@hostname. If there is no such mailing address, you will not receive mail, and any mail sent to you will be bounced back to the original sender.

2.b. Splitting your mail

It is also possible to forward all your email to another email account while having a copy still sent to your athena account. This feature is known as having a SPLIT mailbox. To do this, type the following at the Athena command prompt, usually athena%:

athena% chpobox -S joeuser@example.com

Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for joeuser@example.com.

Please note that splitting uses the capital "S", while forwarding uses the lowercase "s".

You will be able to check your email both on Athena and via your example.com account. It will, again, take up to several hours for the forwarding to take effect. Make sure you type your address exactly as it should be spelled, otherwise copies of your mail will be bounced back to the sender.

Note that there is a quota for how much mail can be stored in your mail box on MIT's PO servers. You should not allow that mail to accumulate without checking it. If you exceed your quota for stored MIT mail, mail sent to you will begin to bounce back to the sender.

The default mail quota is 1GB; depending on how much mail you receive, you may have only a week or so before your mail starts bouncing, if you do not incorporate mail from Athena or use an IMAP client to delete mail on the server.

Ask the User Accounts Office to set it up for you

If you do not usually log into Athena or have trouble with the above commands, you can ask the User Accounts office at the IS&T Computing Help Desk to set up forwarding for you.

Please email your request for forwarding to accounts@mit.edu
Make sure you include the exact email address you want your mail forwarded to

We ask that you email such requests rather than contacting User Accounts by phone, as it is very important that the email address you want to forward your mail to is carefully and correctly specified. Mistakes can easily creep in over the phone. In addition, we will confirm forwarding to your MIT email address to make sure it is indeed you asking us to set up forwarding.

If you have questions, you can also call us before sending your email forwarding request.

Group name:	User Accounts
Email:	accounts@mit.edu
Phone:	+1-617-253-1325

Reverting to your MIT e-mail account

If you want to stop forwarding your mail, just type the below at the Athena command prompt, usually athena%:

athena% chpobox -p

After the next mail hub update (approx. 3 hours) your mail will be delivered to and only to your original MIT mailbox. Please continue to check your external addresses until the update takes effect.

Checking your forwarding status

If you want to see where your mail is currently being forwarded to, you can type this command at the Athena command prompt:

athena% chpobox

It will tell you something that looks like one of the following:

Output	Meaning
User joeuser, Type IMAP, Box: joeuser.po (joeuser@PO11.MIT.EDU) Modified by joeuser@ATHENA.MIT.EDU on 06-jul-2001 12:37:21 with chpobox	The above mail is not being forwarded. Type "IMAP" is what the MIT mail servers are identified as, and the entry "joeuser@PO11.MIT.EDU" means that the mail is being delivered to joeuser's post office server, which is PO11.MIT.EDU.
User freduser, Type SMTP, Box: fred@ucla.edu Modified by freduser@ATHENA.MIT.EDU on 28-aug-2001 09:58:00 with chpobox	The above mail has regular forwarding set up, as indicated by the "SMTP" entry. Any mail addressed to freduser@mit.edu will instead be delivered to fred@ucla.edu.
User janeuser, Type SPLIT, Box: jane@aol.com (janeuser@PO12.MIT.EDU, janeatmit@aol.com) Modified by janeuser on 20-mar-2000 21:21:34 with chpobox	The above mail has split forwarding set up, as seen by the "SPLIT" entry type. Jane's mail is going both to her MIT post office server (PO12), and to her AOL account, janeatmit@aol.com.