University of Houston

Mathematics Department

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Access to Math E-mail

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Math Email will be shutting down by the end of 2019!

Your Math email address can still be used, but all emails that are sent to your math email address will be forwarded to the UH email address you provide.

The information provided below can help you connect to your Math email account, so that you can transfer emails you want to keep to your UH or other email account.  Once you move all your emails you want to keep to your UH or other email account, you should remove the Math email account, to avoid errors.

For more information and instructions for migrating to UH email, go here.

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If you have a math account, you may have a math e-mail address, which would look something like:

[your username]@math.uh.edu

If you have a math email account, then currently, you can only access your email by using an E-mail client such as MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, or any countless otheremail apps.

An E-mail client requires some setup.  Below is the information necessary for connecting to our email servers to receive and send email:

E-mail Server settings

Incoming/Receiving

Supported types/protocols IMAP(preferred) or POP3 (WARNING! POP3 access will be shut down in the near future, so don't rely on this.)
Incoming IMAP server (new)IMAP Server New
Root Folder path (IMAP only)Leave blank

Outgoing/Sending


To send email using your own Internet Provider outside the department
Outgoing serverContact your Internet Provider.  (Sometimes you can guess what this is using the domain from your own email address.  If your email address is sam@somwhere.com, then try smtp.somewhere.com or mail.somewhere.com.)
Other settingsContact your Internet Provider.

To send email using the Math Email Server inside of the Math Department
Outgoing servermail.math.uh.edu

To send email using the Math Email Server outside of the Math Department
Outgoing servermail.math.uh.edu
Outgoing server requires authenticationEnable this and choose "Use same settings as my incoming server"
Outgoing server requires SSL:(For Outlook 2003 and older) Enable this
Use the following type of encrypted connection:(For Outlook 2007 or other email clients) Your choices are SSL or TLS. TLS is the preferred choice.
Port for outgoing server (SMTP)The default port is either 25 or 465.  Change this to 587.

If you are on-campus and using the UH Wireless network, you are still outside of the Math Department network and must use the settings for outside the department.  While at home, it is recommended and also better for you to use your own Internet providers email system to send emails.   This is usually given to you when you first started your internet access, or you can check with your providers website for more information.  

Outgoing emails will show the domain of the outgoing email server you use.   So, if you setup your email client using the Math server for outgoing mail, then the email recipient will see your emails coming from math.uh.edu.  If you setup your Internet Provider as the outgoing mail server, then the recipient will see your emails coming from that domain.  You can usually set the reply-to as where you want replies to go to regardless of where it came from.

To clarify, I'll use an example.  Let's say you have Comcast for your Internet provider.  Your friend Tom (tom@someplace.com) sends you an email to your Comcast email account (sam@comcast.com).  When you reply back, Tom will have an email showing your email address to be sam@math.uh.edu (if you're using the Math outgoing server), or sam@comcast.com (if you're using the Comcast outgoing server.)  This is the default behavior of most email clients, but you can usually change this using the setting for Reply E-mail address.  Change it to the address you want replies to go to.

E-mail Server types explained

IMAP Is a more advanced e-mail protocol.  Instead of storing e-mails on one or more of your PCs, they are stored on the IMAP server.   When you open your e-mail client, only the header information, not the message or attachments, for each e-mail is sent, giving the size, who it's from, the subject and when it was sent.  This makes IMAP faster than POP initially.  When you open an e-mail to view it, a copy is then downloaded from the server, which takes longer according to the size of it.  When you delete an e-mail, the server only marks the e-mail for deletion, putting a line thru it, and you have to purge, or expunge, deleted e-mails to get rid of them..
POP3 Is a simple e-mail protocol.  You "pop" your e-mail off the server into an e-mail client.  This means that when you check your e-mail, any emails on the server are sent to your PC and removed from the server. This is only useful if you only use one PC to check e-mail.   If you "pop" your e-mail to a home computer, then your work computer won't be able to see it, and vice-versa.  (There is a setting for the POP3 protocol to allow copies of your e-mail to be sent and not delete it from the server, but this is not recommended as it can lead to much confusion.)  Also, if you don't have a high-speed internet connection and you receive a lot of e-mails, especially with large attachments, "popping" your e-mail can take a very long time. As an example, if you have 50 new e-mails with some large messages and a few megabytes of attachments, (let's say 10 MB total), then when you open your e-mail client, like Outlook Express , it will take several minutes or longer to download all the e-mails. Once downloaded, then accessing each e-mails is quick.

Detailed intructions on setting up an e-mail client is listed below according to the E-mail client you use.

MS Office XP or 2003 with Outlookhere
Mozilla Thunderbirdhere
Outlook Expresshere

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Copyright Dave Branda 2005.
Last revised: November 14, 2019 20:08