Math Email Migration to UH Email

The Math email server will be closing down by the end of this year and all Math department users will need to transition to another email service.  For full-time staff and faculty, it is required that you use a UH email account.  You may also use your own personal email, like Google's GMail, one of Apple's email accounts or any other email account you wish to use.

Your current math email address will still work, but it will be forwarded to your UH or other email account, once you give us the new email address to forward to.

If you want or need to keep your old emails that are currently in your math account, you can do so, but you will need to move those emails from your math account to your other primary email account, most likely the one you forward your math emails to.  To do this, you will need an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird, AppleMail, or any other email app you wish to use.  The email client allows you to have one or more email accounts connected simutaneously so that you can move/copy emails between the accounts.

Check your email settings in P.A.S.S. or MyUH

The University uses of an Email Alias as the primary email address.  Usually, this address is something similar to

[name]@uh.edu

where [name] is sometimes your Cougarnet username or a short version of your first and last name, and may have a number appended to the end.

You will need to know your Cougarnet username and password to preceed further.  If for some reason you do not know this or you so rarely use it that you have forgotten your username and/or password, you can visit the CougarNet Password Wizard to find your username (click on the link "Forgot your CougarNet ID?") and then reset your password.  Doing this will require that you wait for 15 minutes or more so that your new password is sychronized across all UH servers.  Once completed, you will be shown a time when you can proceed with these instructions.

1) You should login to P.A.S.S. or MyUh to check the details of your Contact information, specifically your email address(es). (The examples here were created using P.A.S.S., but MyUH should be similar.) Click on the "My Personal Info" button.
2) On the left side, click on "Contact Details".
3) The Email section should list 2 or more types of email addresses, only the Business and Destination are relevant here. If your Destination email ends with @central.uh.edu (like in the image) then you can go to the next section to confirm you have a UH Central Email mailbox. If the Destination email address is anything other than a Central Email address, (like maybe [name]@math.uh.edu) and there is no other email listed that ends with @central.uh.edu then chances are that you do not have a UH Central Email account and you should proceed to the next section

Any email address that has a check under Preferred is the default email address that UH will use to contact you.

The @uh.edu address is not an email mailbox and does not actually store emails.  It just forwards any emails that uses this address to another address, which is listed as your Destination email address.

Confirm whether you already have a UH Central Email account

1) You should try to login to UH Webmail website.  Either you can login and see your Inbox or you will get an error stating you do not have an account. Your username will be your username that is before your @uh.edu or @central.uh.edu email addresses, but you will append @cougarnet.uh.edu after your username.  So, if your UH email address is jsmith@uh.edu, then you will login using jsmith@cougarnet.uh.edu Click on the Next button.
2) Enter your Cougarnet password and click on the Next button.
3) You may see the following, if it is the first time you've logged in. Clicking Yes will let you skip typing in your username, like you did in Step 1 above, when you revisting this webpage in the future. Right now, just click No to proceed
4) You may also be asked to set the default language and time zone.  If so, you can change the default language from the default of English and you must select a time zone.  Typical setting for the time zone is Central Time US.  Then click Next.
5) If you get an error message "Something went wrong", then an email mailbox was not created for your username and you should proceed to the next section to request a UH Central Email account
6) If you don't get an error message, then you are probably looking at your Inbox which may or may not have emails shown.  You can skip the next section and proceed to the Email Migration

Request a UH Central Email account

You should only request a UH Central Email account if you have confirmed that you do not already have one.  Go back to the previous section to do that now if you have not already done this.

You may request a UH Central Email account by using this link.  Once you complete the online form, it may take a day or more for the request to be approved and the account created.  You will be contacted by UH IT when it is completed.

I would then suggest that you go back to the previous section and make sure you get to your Inbox, then it is working and you can proceed.  If not, you may have to contact UH IT again or just wait a few hours or a day and try again.  Also, your Central email address may be quite different than your UH Email Alias.  For example, your UH Email Alias may be joecougar@uh.edu, but your UH Central Email address may by jcougar@central.uh.edu.  This may have happened to avoid duplicating someone elses email address.

Turn off mail forwarding for your UH Email

Go back to the first section and follow Steps 1-3 to get to the Email settings in Contact Details.

If your Destination email is not set to your @central.uh.edu email address, change it to your @central.uh.edu address.  Once you save the change, it may take hours or a day or two for it to take effect.

Confirm you are receiving emails in your UH Central Email account

Using any other email account (your Math email or Google or any other) send an email to your @uh.edu email address and another different one to your @central.uh.edu email address.   Then check your UH Central Email and make sure you received both emails.  Be aware that there can can a delay of 1 minute or longer before it actually gets delivered to your Inbox.

If you do not receive one or both emails, check to if you got a bounce notice.  If not, check the email account you had as your Destinantion previously, as it may not have changed yet

Once you are sure all emails sent to your @uh.edu and @central.uh.edu are in your UH Central eamil inbox, then you can proceed with the next section.  It is very important that your UH emails are not being forwarded back to your Math account, as they will bounce back and forth between the Math and UH email servers and you may loose those emails.

Forward your Math email account to your UH email account

To forward your Math emails to the UH Central Email account, send an email to ude.hu.htam@pleh.

Subject: Please forward my email

Body:   I would like to start forwarding my emails to [username]@uh.edu.

Migrate emails from Math to your UH account

If you will use a department desktop PC or laptop to copy your old Math emails to your new UH email account, you may already have Microsoft Outlook setup for your use.  If not, you can email ude.hu.htam@pleh to request that Outlook be setup for you.

UH Central Email Account setup

1) If this is your first time using Outlook, then you might get a popup window saying "Welcome to Outlook".  If so, click the Next button and then click the Next button again. You can skip down to Step 4.
2) If you have already used Outlook and want to setup your UH Central Email account, click on the File menu in the upper left corner of Outlook.  Then Click the Account Settings button and click on Account Settings.
3) Make sure the E-Mail tab is selected and the click the New... button right underneath it.
4) Enter your name as you want others to see it. Enter your emaill address that ends with @central.uh.edu Enter your password twice in the two password boxes and then click the Next button.
5) Outlook will then try to connect to the UH Central EMail account, which can take a while and will not complete without entering more information.
6) You will get a popup warning, so just check the option "Don't ask me about this website again" and then click the Allow button.
7) Another popup will appear asking for your password, but this is where you need to change the account username, so do not enter your password. Click on More Choices and then the poup will show two choices. Click on the Use a different account
8) Then enter your Cougarnet username and append @cougarnet.uh.edu to the end, so that it looks like an email address, and enter your password in the password box. It should now look similar the the image on the right.  Then click the Ok button.
9) After the popups go away, the main window should show the following. Be sure to check the "Change account settings" option before you click the Next button
10) Under Offline Settings, uncheck the "Use Cached Exchange Mode" option before you click the Finish button.

Transfer old emails to UH Email account

With Outlook, or your other preferred email client, setup with two email accounts, you can now begin copying the old emails you want to keep from your math email account to your UH email account.

This is a good time to cleanup

Now is a good time to delete old emails that are no longer useful.  Below are the relevant UH policies on email and email retention.  It is your responsibility to read and understand the UH policies and determine what is still useful and delete what is not.

When you're done...

After you've moved or copied all the emails you want to keep from your math email account to your UH email account, you can email ude.hu.htam@pleh to let us know you no longer need your email mailbox and we will close and delete it.  If you setup forwarding to your UH emaill address, then you will still receive emails that are sent to your @math.uh.edu address, but at your other email account that it was forwarded to.

At this point, it is recommended that you remove the math email account from your email client, as it will stop working and may causes errors trying to connect to an email server that you no longer have access to.  From example 3 above, instead of clicking on "New", click on "Remove".  You will get a warning popup to confirm you want to delete the account.  Click Yes and the account will be removed.

Typically, an email client will allow you to use any email address to show who the email is from.  When replying or creating a new email, look to set the From header.  Outlook and other email clients will sometimes use the same email address it was sent to in the From header, so if you get an email sent to your @math.uh.edu address, this may already be shown in the From header.  If not, you can usually set this yourself manually.

Last revised: September 11, 2023 17:03