Welcome to the homepage for the Cambridge University Campaign for Real Mail!
We're a group of technically-minded individuals within the University of Cambridge who oppose the migration to Microsoft's Exchange Online (ExOL) email service. We consist of staff, students and alumni who care about the University and are dismayed to see the harm that's being caused by this policy change being forced through. While we recognise that most people likely don't have a strong opinion on this, there are a small number for whom this makes their work more difficult or their research actively impossible from their @cam.ac.uk email addresses.
A genuine RFC-compliant email system. Hermes was; Exchange Online is not. Support for open protocols like SMTP and IMAP is a must.
Before 31st December 2021.
Rest in peace, Hermes. Exchange Online will never match your open standards. Gone, but not forgotten.
Show your support by linking to this site from your personal webpage or sharing on your social media!
Join the ~20% of the University that use an alternative email system.
Who does the forced ExOL migration affect? Whose workflows are disrupted by this? Please contact us if you want to be included on this list:
https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/. Not only does this leak information about when links are clicked to a third party, but it can also make it quite difficult for people to discuss URLs by email.Cambridge's first email service was introduced in 1986 with the Phoenix system, the University's IBM mainframe computer housed in the Arup building (now the David Attenborough building) on what is the present-day New Museums Site. It ran locally-developed mail software on top of MVS with networking provided by JANET's X.25 service and "Coloured Book" protocols. Phoenix was shut down on 1st September 1995.
1991 heralded the arrival of the Central Unix Service, at the time a department of the venerated University Computing Service. The CUS ran Smail initially and Exim later on in life. Compared to Phoenix, CUS were far more restrictive about who was allowed to have an account and typically only staff and graduate students were granted access. While a small handful of undergraduates did have access to the Unix Service, this was uncommonly rare.
The retirement of Phoenix meant that a new open-access service was needed for those ineligible for CUS accounts and so, in 1993, Hermes was brought into service. It wasn't until the early 2000s that amenities such as webmail were introduced, first using the Prayer software and later using Roundcube. December 2021 saw the closure of the Hermes service after 28 years of faithful service, to be replaced by Microsoft's proprietary Exchange Online system.
Cambridge University is responsible for spawning many email innovations still in widespread use today. Exim started out life as a project of the University Computing Service and is now a fully-fledged independent free/open-source software project, and the most popular MTA on the Internet. Prayer was developed entirely on-site and was inspired by a similar project at Oxford University called WING. It is still available as a package in many popular Linux distributions.
Old pictures of Hermes, the University's previous mail system. While the hardware has long since changed, Tony Finch's site is still an excellent read for those interested in the history of mail at Cambridge.
Toby Clifton's notes on migrating away from ExOL.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog post on open-vs-proprietary email standards and why Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is awful.
Michael Rutter’s notes on migrating mail over IMAP.
Photos of Hermes' machine room in 2006, taken by Dominic Ford.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Exim, and the Word was Exim.