Email forwarding

April 24, 2005 9:15 PM

I work at a university .. my university's web mail console pretty much stinks .. i would like to create a server-side filter to have my email automatically forwarded to my gmail account. Problem is that my university's control panel doesn't allow me to do this. Is there another way ?
posted by jason9009 to technology (5 comments total)

What university do you go to? There's no easy way to do this unless your university fascilitates this. But (as is the case with my university) email-forwarding setups are occasionally obscure. The overwhelming majority of universities do offer mail forwarding as a way of weaning their alumni from their student mailbox. If you post the name of your university, I could help you look through the documentation.
posted by ori at 9:24 PM on April 24, 2005

Does your uni do email via a unix machine that users have command line access to? If so, you could create a .forward file.
posted by ursus_comiter at 10:46 PM on April 24, 2005

As an aside, if you have access to an imap server or a pop server there are other possible solutions. I'd need a bit more info about what kind of email service your university provides. Can you connect to the server with a email program, like outlook or thunderbird?
posted by Freen at 11:17 PM on April 24, 2005

yeah, pop3 or imap would be my suggestion as well. Or if you were super cool, you could use the DOM class in PHP to write a scraping program, as the Kottke describes today on his weblog.

/I am not super cool.

p.s. I switched to gmail from our crappy university webmail, and just slowly taught people my new address.
posted by craniac at 4:34 PM on April 25, 2005

I just want to second the .forward suggestion. Neither my Rutgers nor NJIT accounts have any apparent way to forward e-mail. You need to find out if you can telnet/SSH into your account and create a .forward file. It worked perfectly for me.
posted by exhilaration at 2:35 PM on April 27, 2005