Alumni Email FAQ

You can access your account at http://outlook.office.com. Sign in with your alumni email address (i.e. timbeaver@alum.mit.edu). If you're prompted to choose between work or school or personal account, choose the work or school account option. You will ultimately end up on the MIT Touchstone login page, where you should enter your alumni username (i.e. timbeaver) and password, and then you will arrive at your inbox. If you have a personal account on Outlook.com, it should look familiar because the interface is the same.   

If you want to use an email application like Apple Mail or Outlook to manage your alum.mit.edu email account, all you need to do is open the email application and add a new email account, choose Microsoft Exchange for the mail account provider (if the option exists), and enter your alumni email address and login credentials.

PLEASE NOTE: Versions of Outlook older than Outlook 2019 are not compatible with your @alum.mit.edu email account. You need to use Outlook 2019 or newer - or use Outlook webmail. 

No, your email address will NOT change.

Yes, you can continue to use the email forwarding feature. By default email forwarding will continue to work and will NOT be disabled. You can change your email delivery options here.

You should note, though, that new spam rules and policies make it very difficult to offer a reliable forwarding-only service at this point. We have found that email forwarding is becoming less reliable as spam filtering policies get more aggressive. In other words, forwarded mail looks suspicious and causes a red flag in spam filtering systems where mail is forwarded to. This results in the forwarded mail getting flagged as spam or silently dropped (the latter of which is becoming more common). This is why we are now offering the alumni Outlook mailbox. Unfortunately email forwarding alone is no longer a viable option and you run the risk of losing/missing mail if you use it strictly as a forwarding address. 

You can continue to use your @alum.mit.edu address as a forwarding address. Email sent to your @alum.mit.edu address will go to the inbox of your alumni Outlook account AND forward to your specified forwarding address(es). That's the default setting. 

An email-forwarding-only service - with no storage of email - is not an option. Your forwarded emails are going through the Outlook server and will be stored in your Outlook account. MIT's campus email infrastructure is also on the Microsoft O365 platform. The @alum.mit.edu email accounts were rolled in with the campus infrastructure to maintain proper levels of maintenance and support.

You should also note that new spam rules and policies make it very difficult to offer a reliable forwarding-only service at this point. We have found that email forwarding is becoming less reliable as spam filtering policies get more aggressive. In other words, forwarded mail looks suspicious and causes a red flag in spam filtering systems where mail is forwarded to. This results in the forwarded mail getting flagged as spam or silently dropped (the latter of which is becoming more common). This is why we are now offering the alumni Outlook mailbox. Unfortunately email forwarding alone is no longer a viable option and you run the risk of losing/missing mail if you use it strictly as a forwarding address. 

To turn off email forwarding, go to your "Email and Forwarding" settings. Under "Email Delivery Options" choose "Send email to my alumni Outlook account only." You need to click the pencil icon to change the settings. It can take up to an hour for this change to take effect.

If you see the following notification, you can safely ignore it. This is due to a system configuration in order to allow users to use the Outlook account AND forward email. Unfortunately there's no way to turn it off at this time.  

Your alum email account has 50GB of storage. Once your account reaches 49GB a warning email will be sent to you.

Your account has 50GB of storage space. We are working to implement a retention policy which will purge email from Deleted Items and Junk Email after 90 days. You will receive an email warning once your account reaches 49GB of capacity. You can check your storage status here:
https://outlook.office.com/mail/options/general/storage  

Display name changes are something we need to do on our end. Please send email email to help@alum.mit.edu and we will take care of it for you.

MIT has disabled basic SMTP authentication to protect alumni email accounts. Basic SMTP Authentication is the process through which desktop and mobile apps send username/password pairs to the sending (SMTP) server. Even though it greatly simplifies the authentication process, Basic Authentication makes it a lot easier for hackers to steal the credentials. We have seen a spike in attempts from hackers to gain access to alumni accounts. If an account is compromised the hackers can use basic SMTP authentication to send spam by simply using the alum's login credentials. To further protect against this, beginning October 1, 2022, Microsoft (which is the platform your alumni account is on) and MIT will require the use of Modern authentication (OAuth 2) and will no longer make exceptions and allow certain users to use basic SMTP authentication to send email from their @alum.mit.edu accounts. Some email clients, such as Gmail's "send mail as" feature, do not support OAuth 2. Therefore, you unfortunately will not be able to use this feature to send email "from" your alumni account. If you have questions please contact help@alum.mit.edu.    

Note that you can always use the Outlook web app to send/receive email. 

MIT's campus email infrastructure is now on O365. MIT's central IT department (IS&T) manages and maintains the @alum.mit.edu email service so it was rolled in with the campus infrastructure to maintain proper levels of maintenance and support. 

If you're setting up your Exchange account on your mobile device for the first time, you might come across a "Remote Security Activation" message. This message will state that the MIT Exchange Server needs to remotely control security features on your device. The user must accept in order to complete the Exchange account activation. These notifications are simply default Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) messages. The language is written by the mobile device manufacturers, not by MIT. Since it was created by another party, we do not have the ability to change the language. MIT's central IT department does NOT remotely control user devices, in any way, shape, or form. Unfortunately, these messages cannot be bypassed without accepting, as this is an integrated Exchange feature. Not accepting means you cannot connect to your Exchange account. To reiterate, MIT does not remotely control user devices, in any way, shape, or form.

The emails are most likely in your Outlook inbox but are hard to find due to the way the Outlook web app (http://outlook.office.com) is displaying your mail. By default it is set to "show email grouped by conversation." If you search your inbox (by sender, for example) you will probably find the "missing" messages. If you click on the >, you will see all the chained messages. You can change the display setting to "show email as individual message" (so they're not grouped together) here: 
https://outlook.office.com/mail/options/mail/layout