Since the announcement that Hermes would be closed, various departments and the SRCF have set up new standards-compliant email systems for their members to use, or improved their existing offerings. We collect here a list of email systems provided in the University, roughly arranged by who may use them.
If you know of a system that is not listed here, please contact us.
Anybody with a Raven account may join the SRCF and use this system.
Hades is based on Postfix and Dovecot. IMAP and SMTP are supported, as are two webmail interfaces: roundcube and prayer. At the time of writing, mailboxes are not quotaed by default, on the understanding that quotas will be imposed if they are found to be necessary. For comparison, the default SRCF home directory quota is 2GB.
Note that the SRCF is run by volunteers, and relies on donations. At present, mail is stored on NetApp filers donated by the Computer Laboratory.
Hades offers a submission agent behind PPSwitch for all SRCF members, irrespective of whether they take mail on Hades.
In addition to Hades, the SRCF continues to run (and does not plan to withdraw) its original mail system on its main shell server, pip. This allows the user to use Exim filter files, which give tremendous flexibility in mail processing.
Pip also allows mail to be saved locally, by default in an mbox that is also served over IMAP by Dovecot. For most users, even those that need Exim filtering, it is likely to be more useful to store mail on Hades than pip; mail to addresses @hades.srcf.net go directly to Hades, irrespective of where @srcf.net mail is set to go.
Pip does not offer submission over SMTP. Users are directed to use Hades’ submission agent instead; this is available to all SRCF users irrespective of whether they store mail on Hades.
If you have a good reason to not use the University’s Exchange Online email system and are a member of research, academic or academic related staff in Maths you have an option of using the Maths mail server.
The Faculty of Mathematics has recently redesigned its local mail system. It is based around Exim and Cyrus (as was Hermes). IMAP and SMTP are supported, as are two webmail interfaces: roundcube and prayer. At the time of writing, mailboxes have a 100 GB quota; the same as ExOL. Accounts are available to qualifying users upon request.
The CL offers Fastmail accounts to members of the department that cannot use ExOL. Fastmail is built around the same Cyrus IMAP server as Hermes (indeed Fastmail are major contributors to Cyrus). Use of the CL Message Submission Agent is recommended, but SMTP submission through Fastmail’s servers is also possible. Fastmail also provide their own mobile app and webmail, as well as a tool to migrate your mail from other services. At the time of writing, the default quota is 30GB, with up to 100GB hypothetically available upon request.