Yes, you can set up UMail to forward your email messages to another address (e.g., gmail or yahoo) through the UMail Post Office. This is especially useful if you already have a personal email account and you wish to check messages coming into your UMail address as well. Remember that the University uses UMail to send all official student communications.

Visit the OIT NetID & Passwords page for instructions on how to change your UMail Password.

Students who graduate from UMass or leave the University in good standing have access to UMail at no cost for 6 months after their graduation/leave date. After graduation, students have the option to request an additional 6-month extension. For more information visit our UMail Extension page. You can also get a UMass email address through UMass Amherst Alumni Association.

There are two ways to access your UMail account:

• UMail on Web using your Internet browser. This allows you to access UMail from any computer with an Internet connection
• Email software such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger, MS Outlook, or Apple Mail.

You can find instructions for setting up OIT-supported email software on the UMail section of the OIT site.

Make sure that you are entering your NetID and UMail password correctly. The UMail login fields are case sensitive, so make sure you have not activated the CAPS LOCK key on your keyboard or you won't be able to log in.

Try to use your UMail account for school-related email only, that will largely prevent your address from falling into the hands of scammers and spammers. Check your Spam Filtering settings to make sure they are appropriate (OIT Spam Filtering is turned on by default). Learn how to secure your system from spam, malware and other security threats by visiting the OIT Virus & Security Center.

If you have pop-up blocking software installed on your computer, make sure that it is not blocking the UMail Compose window. Try a different browser to make sure this is not the issue. The most common ones other than Microsoft Internet Explorer are Mozilla Firefox and Netscape. There are versions available for either Windows or Macintosh computers.

For security reasons, UMail will automatically block any messages containing files with the extensions listed below. Extensions appear after the period of a filename. For example, in a file named whatever.exe, .exe is the extension.

The blocked extensions are:

ade, adp, app, asd, asf, asx, bas, bat, chm, cmd, com, cpl, crt, dll, exe, fxp, hlp, hta, hto, inf, ini, ins, isp, jse?, lib, lnk, mdb, mde, msc, msi, msp, mst, ocx, pcd, pif, prg, reg, scr, sct, sh, shb, shs, sys, url, vb, vbe, vbs, vcs, vxd, wmd, wms, wmz, wsc, wsf, wsh.

Some of these file extensions are associated with Malware (e.g., viruses and worms), while others, such as .exe or . dll are associated with specific applications that run on Windows computers. If you have to exchange a file of one of these types with someone, we recommend saving it to your UDrive and sending the recipient a link to it, burning it to CD or saving it to a USB drive. If you are a UMass staff member, you can use a shared network drive to exchange these kinds of files.

You can set up an automatic message that will be sent as a reply to anyone who sends an email to your UMail address. Log in to the UMail Post Office and click Vacation Reply.

If you use UMail with an email client (i.e., Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail), there is a size limit of 15 MB for attachments. Note, however, that some files become larger when they are converted to be sent by UMail. Files such as Power Point presentations, images, video or sound may even double in size after conversion, so the size of the file on your computer might not correlate to the size of the file as an attachment in UMail.

UMail on the Web has a smaller attachment size limit (5 MB). There is no limit on the number of attachments you can send.

UMass Amherst students get a 30 MB account limit and faculty and staff get 150 MB of space. If your UMail is over quota, you will stop receiving messages until there is space on your account. Undelivered messages are not deleted and you will receive them once you free up some space on your account. You do this by deleting and purging messages from your UMail folders. For more information, see OIT's guidelines to clean up your UMail account. You can check your quota usage by logging in to the UMail Post Office.

If you need to restore messages that have been permanently deleted, please fill out an online Help Request. OIT can only restore mail messages or folders that were deleted within the past two weeks.

Note: Depending on your mail configuration, deleted files and folders are usually marked as deleted or moved to the Trash folder. Purging deleted messages, compacting a folder, or emptying the Trash folder permanently deletes messages in that folder. If you have not performed one of these actions on the folder in question, you can easily restore deleted messages yourself.

If you encounter problems, submit an online Help Request.
- or -
Contact the OIT Help Desk at 545-9400.