Using aliases through external email providers

Campus IT groups have in the past discussed the Official Student Email Address and are proposing the following clarification:

Students should be aware that mail sent using an off-campus email address may be rejected by the recipient as it doesn't easily identify who they are. Mail sent from an off-campus email service using a uWaterloo email address may at times be rejected as well, due to spam filters. So it's safest to always use an on-campus email service.

However, some students choose to use an off-campus email service. This document provides instructions on how to best use the Google Mail (Gmail) service. Similar steps can be followed for other email providers such as outlook.com .  

Redirecting Waterloo campus email

The first step is to have email sent to userid@uwaterloo.ca go to your external account. To make this change, please visit the setting up a filter page. 

Sending email with your Waterloo account through an external provider

Some professors prefer that students only send from their Waterloo email account when corresponding via email. Also for purposes of co-op or other reasons it may appear more professional to send from your uwaterloo.ca account.

To accomplish this in Gmail follow the steps outlined in Sending mail from a different address. At step 5 choose to "Use your other email provider's SMTP". The SMTP server is mailservices.uwaterloo.ca and SSL should be enabled. Authenticate with your Mailservices userid and password.

After you click on the confirmation email (which should go into your Gmail inbox if you have setup forwarding already) you will now be able to send email from your userid@uwaterloo.ca address.

Migrating email from Mailservices to Gmail

With the forwarding and filtering you setup above only new messages sent to userid@uwaterloo.ca will go to your Gmail account. If you have email messages currently on your Mailservices account that you would like to move to your external account, you could use a third party email client (such as Thunderbird) to migrate existing email.

Create an IMAP connection to both Gmail and Mailservices at the same time. Then you can use the mail client to drag the emails/folders from Mailservices into Gmail.