Difference between revisions of "E-mail"

Revision as of 16:52, 19 June 2013

For detailed guides on how to set up your system for e-mail at DTU please see the information on portalen AIT Email FAQ

For a description of the various mailing lists at DTU Compute please follow this link.

The mail services at DTU Compute are facilitated by the DTU email systems. It can roughly be categorised in to three different e-mail components:

• A central Microsoft Exchange server at DTU for presenting mail (plus more: calendar, address book, tasks etc)
• SMTP gateways for sending and receiving all mail for imm.dtu.dk domain
• Spam and antivirus scan (see email scanning at DTU Compute)

These components offers a very flexible scenario in terms of choice of e-mail client and operating system for the users. Generally the components offer the following e-mail related services:

• imaps (mail.dtu.dk) - imaps is supported by virtually all modern e-mail clients (see exception for android below)
  
• web mail (mail.win.dtu.dk) - provides mail access from any where with a web browser. The link to remember is http://mail.win.dtu.dk/.
• MAPI (mail.win.dtu.dk)
• Outlook Mobile Access (mail.win.dtu.dk) - webmail access optimised for browsers on mobile devices
• RPC over HTTPS (mail.win.dtu.dk) - full Outlook functionality form external networks
• Active Sync (mail.win.dtu.dk) - service allowing mobile devices such as mobile phones to synchronise personal mail, calendars, address books and tasks
• SMTP (mail.dtu.dk) - handles e-mail transmissions to and from DTU Informatics

Generally speaking, everybody with an account on the DTU Compute IT systems (except students) have an email address LOGONNAME@imm.dtu.dk. This address is being used for DTU Compute mailing list, etc. All new staff users (incl. PhD. students) and guests are provided with a mailbox on the DTU exchange server while students with an account at DTU Compute will have their email forwarded to s012345@student.dtu.dk.

Microsoft Exchange Server

The Microsoft Exchange Server at DTU is Exchange 2010 Enterprise Edition. This offers additional functionality:

• e-mail via MAPI, imaps, web (OWA and OMA) or rpc over http
• Personal and shared calendars, address books and tasks via MAPI, web or rpc over http
• Synch to mobile devices - via Active Sync

The exchange server is administered by the DTU central IT department (AIT) but support is usually via DTU Compute ITSupport.

To take full advantage of all the features included in the exchange server one has to use Microsoft Outlook (windows) as a client capable of utilising the MAPI interface. Entourage (for Mac) and Evolution (for Sun/Linux) both offers "almost" full functionality as they utilise the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface to Exchange. All three clients handles remote access very well (same functionality from external networks).

To read "just" mail (mostly non Windows users), a multitude of imaps clients exist. The most popular client amongst DTU Compute non-MS users is Mozilla Thunderbird (all platforms). For imaps on some android systems, see below.

Web mail on the exchange server can be accessed from any browser (except maybe Lynx). Internet Explorer will provide most functionality as it uses so called "Premium OWA" interface where as other browsers, such as Firefox, will have to settle with the "Light OWA" interface. Still browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and alike provide mail, calender, address book and tasks functionality.

Special Exchange features

There is a few settings that users should be aware of.

Exchange Backup

A backup of the exchange server is performed once per day. The purpose of the backup is crash recovery, i.e. in case the exchange server breaks down DTU will be able to restore the mailbox with a loss of data of up to 1 day. The possibility for restoring individual mails accidentally deleted by the end user is quite limited (although in special cases possible). Instead accidentally deleted mails can be restored using outlook within the retention period (see below).

Retention time

Objects (i.e. email, contacts, etc.) deleted is normally just moved to a "Deleted Items" and once the "Deleted Items" is purged the items are completely removed. However, items deleted completely from the mailbox store is still available in a retention period of 30 days, i.e up to 30 after the item has been deleted it is possible to restore the item.

SMTP on Android

For at least som versions of Android, it is not possible to use the DTU SMTP server because of the nonstandard settings.

You can use Exchange and accept the terms. This limits your phone's login possibilities to the more secure ones, not generally a problem, but it breaks some start screens and you may not like the terms. Central DTU IT say they will note wipe your phone or do any of the other things you allow them to, so it should be OK to accept the terms.

If you still want to use SMTP, you can use smtpauth.imm.dtu.dk, however you will not be able to send mail to internal DTU Compute mailinglists, as the server is seen as external by the central DTU mail server.

To use smtpauth, you need:

Server: smtpauth.imm.dtu.dk

Sec type: TLS

Port: 587

check Require sign-in

Username and password as usual at Compute