Accessing email from DPMMS computers

The applications supported by DPMMS for reading and sending email are pine and mutt on Unix and Eudora on PCs. You can run pine on any dpmms machine if you can ssh to that machine. See Using SSH to connect to DPMMS for more about this.

You may use other programs on our machines to read your DPMMS email, but we may not be able to help if things go wrong.

Web mail

When you are away from DPMMS and are using someone else's computer it may be convenient to use a web browser to read your email. For several years Queens' College provided a web interface to our mailboxes. We now run the software that the Hermes webmail service uses, which allows you to see all your folders, not just your inbox. This service is available at https://mail.dpmms.cam.ac.uk.

[This is a secure web page (the s in https:// is the hint); a few older or experimental web browsers do not support this, although almost any browser that you will wish to use will.]

Configuring mail clients on personal machines to access DPMMS email

Our mail server is mail.dpmms.cam.ac.uk.

You can receive your incoming mail via secure imap. We did run a pop server, but it is insecure and has been phased out.

To send outgoing mail through our server, you need to use the secure option, possibly labelled TLS, STARTTLS or SMTPS. (This is because we don't allow machines outside the department to send mail through our server - except to our users).

Some technical points for those who care or need to know:

  • The old name imap.dpmms.cam.ac.uk may still work but your mail program will likely object to the security certificate. Please use mail.dpmms.cam.ac.uk instead.
  • If you are setting up a college machine but your college doesn't have an smtp server, you ought to set your mail application to use the university smart host ppsw.cam.ac.uk

The Computing service web page Mail program settings for Hermes has links to instructions for setting a variety of email programs: don't forget to use the address mail.dpmms.cam.ac.uk not the Hermes addresses. However DPMMS no longer has a pop service.