Overview

There are two ways to forward your incoming MIT email 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 MIT email inbox or MIT web email access program (WebMail or OWA). When you split your email, a copy is made of all incoming email. One copy will appear in your MIT inbox as before, and another copy will be sent to the address you specify.

How to Start Email Forwarding on Athena (Command Line)

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.

Forwarding your email

If you want to forward all of 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%:

joeuser@athena:~$ chpobox -s joeuser@example.com
Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for joeuser@example.com.

It may take a minute or two for the forwarding to take effect - longer if there are a number of other people making changes at the same time. In the meantime, you should continue checking your MIT email 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.

Splitting your email

It is also possible to forward all your email to another email account while still having a copy 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%:

joeuser@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. 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 mail 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 2GB; depending on how much mail you receive you may have only a week or so before your mail starts bouncing, if you do not move it to your local computer with an email client or login to delete it from the server.

Reverting to your MIT email account using chpobox

Again, the change may take a minute or two to take effect.

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

joeuser@athena:~$ chpobox -p

After a minute or two (maybe longer) 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 using Athena

You can type this command at the Athena command prompt:

joeuser@athena:~$ chpobox

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

OutputMeaning
User jarandom, Type EXCHANGE, Box: EXCHANGE.MIT.EDU (jarandom@EXCHANGE.MIT.EDU)
  Modified by jarandom on 20-aug-2015 10:23:38 with chpobox
Mail is not being forwarded. Type "EXCHANGE" is what the MIT Exchange mail servers are identified as. The entry "EXCHANGE.MIT.EDU" means that the mail is being delivered to jarandom's MIT Exchange inbox.
User freduser, Type SMTP, Box: fred@ucla.edu
  Modified by freduser@ATHENA.MIT.EDU on 28-aug-2014 09:58:00 with chpobox
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: janeatmit@gmail.com (janeuser@EXCHANGE.MIT.EDU,
 janeatmit@gmail.com)
  Modified by janeuser on 20-aug-2015 21:21:34 with chpobox
Mail has split forwarding set up, as seen by the "SPLIT" entry type. Jane's mail is going both to her MIT Exchange inbox, and to her Gmail account, janeatmit@gmail.com.