Email settings page: forwarding, vacation mailer and filtering
You can arrange to have your email forwarded automatically to another address and you can use the vacation mailer to send an automatic response to messages when you are unable to deal with them immediately yourself. These facilities can be extremely useful, but they can cause problems. Consider carefully before using them.It is also useful to be able to filter your mail, which you can do either within your email client (such as Eudora) or else "on the server". The advantage of filtering out junk mail "on the server" is that it saves having it all downloaded into your Eudora.
These functions can be set up using the email settings page. Before deciding to use them please consider the warnings given below as well as More about filters.
If you decide that you do want to set up automatic forwarding or an automatic response, you can use the email settings page to set up forwarding or the vacation mailer for your personal email account or for non-personal email accounts.
The procedures on the email settings page are unsuitable for older type of secondary account. If you have an older secondary account and wish to convert it to a non-personal email account, please contact the Helpdesk.
Further information on non-personal accounts and secondary accounts is available here.
Dangers of forwarding
The likeliest causes of problems with forwarding are:
- If you give an incorrect forwarding address at the outset.
- If you change your Internet Service Provider and get another address, but fail to change your forwarding address.
- If your external mail provider treats forwarded mail as junk and discards it.
You must check that your forwarding arrangement is working, and that it continues to work. One way to check is to send yourself a message addressed to your University address, and check up that it is received at your forwarding address. You should do this check at intervals, in case things have changed. You could also ask someone else to email you at your University address, and check that their message is correctly forwarded.
Mail can be lost because of the Hotmail junk filters
This note describes the problem and explains how you can get round it. Similar problems can arise with other mail systems such as Yahoo.
Dangers of the vacation mailer
The chief reason for hesitating before using the vacation mailer is that in some cases it will send an automatic response to incoming junk mail or spam. On the whole it is a bad idea to respond to junk mail because it only confirms your address and so could lead to further junk messages.
This risk can be exaggerated. Many, perhaps most, spam merchants do not give a valid return address, so your vacation message might well never be delivered to the senders of junk messages. Some junk mail messages do not show your e-mail address as a recipient, in which case the vacation mailer will not respond to them. Nonetheless the risk of increasing your volume of junk mail by using the vacation mailer remains. As often happens, you need to decide whether the convenience of sending a vacation message to your genuine correspondents outweighs the inconvenience of an unquantifiable increase in junk mail.