E-Mail access

Martinos Center Email Server page

A web page is available at the easy to remember address of:

  http://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

At this site you will find links to:

1. Read email through your web browser
2. Setup an Out-of-Office (aka vacation) reply
3. Setup email forwarding to another address
4. FileDrop -- a site to upload large attachments instead of mailing them
5. Change filter settings in Partners Gateway

Email Reader Settings

Incoming e-mail access is provided for Martinos Center research personnel via the IMAP and POP mail remote mail access protocols over SSL. Remote mail agents such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mac Mail utility and Netscape all do at least one of these protocols. Configure your email client to use these settings:

Server: mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
SSL: on
Port: 993

You can use either POP or IMAP. Make sure to enable SSL (often found in advanced options). Eudora v5.1 claims to support SSL but it does not appear to work consistently. All email readers we know get the port right automatically, but if not the port for IMAP should be 993 and the port for POP should be 995. Make sure any setting referring to a root folder is left blank (on the old server we had users set this to "mail")

We strongly suggest using IMAP rather than POP unless you consistently use just one computer to read your email and you make backups of that computer.

Outgoing e-mail settings are

Server: mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu or smtp.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
Port: 465
SSL (or TLS): on
Login/Authentication: on/required (same user/pw as for incoming)
DO NOT turn on "Secure Password Authentication"

This should work from anywhere on the internet including a traveling laptop or home PC. In some programs, like evolution that do not have an explicit field for the port number, you can give the server as smtp.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu:465 to set the port.

WARNING: for some versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, you must use mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu as your outgoing server instead of smtp.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu due to a failure of Microsoft to follow standards properly. This could be true of other readers, so if you have trouble using one server with your email client, try the other. If mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu does not work on port 465, try using it on port 587 instead.

Because of the use of SSL, your password and messages are encrypted during transmission in communications with our servers. However, beyond that there is no further encryption of the message. So this is not a guarantee of the privacy of your correspondence. There are many third-party tools for message body encryption but unfortunately no clear standards yet.

If you are getting messages about an invalid or insecure certificate then see these two FAQ items.

Pine and IMAP

For information on moving local pine folders into the mail server via IMAP and setting up pine to use them via IMAP, read this page.