Email and Communicating
CSAIL Email vs MIT Email (and email forwarding)
MIT students, faculty, and staff members receive an MIT email address and can read and send email via MIT’s Athena mailhubs. The Athena mail system provides you with an address at mit.edu, which you may prefer to give out because it it short and prestigious. You will also receive a CSAIL account. You may like to read your mail at CSAIL because we provide slightly better spam control. Also, CSAIL serves fewer users than MIT, so your first choice for an account name is more likely to be available at CSAIL than at MIT. You can use the two accounts separately or forward one to the other for convenience.
- You could keep your MIT and CSAIL mail accounts completely separate. If you don’t change anything, you will need to log into each account separately to read all of your mail.
- You could have your MIT email forwarded to your CSAIL account. Use
Athena’s
chpoboxcommand. See also IS&T’s page on Email Forwarding Options at MIT. - You could have your CSAIL email forwarded to your MIT account, or to another destination entirely (Gmail, or your research group’s mailhub). See Email Forwarding
These choices have implications for who can help you with email problems and questions. (For instance, TIG sysadmins can trace the path of mail messages through our own mail servers, but not through IS&T’s or Google’s.)
Account Creation
You may have a CSAIL account and not a CSAIL IMAP account, for example,
if you forward your @csail.mit.edu email to another address. If you want instead to have your @csail.mit.edu mail delivered locally and read it on our IMAP server, you can Create your IMAP account (CSAIL Login required) which will overwrite any forwarding options.
It takes up to half an hour for forwarding changes to take effect, so for a little while after you create your CSAIL IMAP account your mail may still be forwarded as it was before. You’ll need to wait a while before testing your new IMAP account.
Email Passwords
CSAIL IMAP email passwords are distinct from your CSAIL Kerberos passwords. If you need to change your CSAIL email password and know your CSAIL Kerberos password, you can Change your IMAP password here (CSAIL Login required)
TIG recommends using unique, different passwords for your CSAIL Kerberos and CSAIL email accounts.
Email Aliases
New alias may take up to an hour to be accessible. Create an Email Alias (CSAIL Login required)