Indiana University
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ARCHIVED: Reading email

On this page:

Email basics

Email service has two aspects:

  • Your email account, which exists on a server

  • Your email client, which is the software you use to read your mail; this can be a browser-based application (e.g., IU Webmail) or a program that you download and set up on your computer (e.g., Outlook Express)

How you read your mail depends on which client you use and what kind of account or accounts you have. Not all clients work with all types of accounts.

Students create email accounts on the Imail or Umail systems; access is browser-based via the web, although a desktop client is another option. Some faculty and staff use a Cyrus account for email. Graduate students, student employees, faculty, and staff may use an IU Exchange account additionally or instead; IU Exchange accounts offer administrative functionality like calendaring in addition to email. The table below shows which clients can be used with which account. (Desktop clients include Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird.)

Imail accounts ARCHIVED: On the web Desktop clients BlackBerry
Umail accounts On the web Desktop clients BlackBerry
IU Exchange accounts Outlook Web App Desktop clients ARCHIVED: BlackBerry
Cyrus accounts IU Webmail Desktop clients BlackBerry

For more, see IU email systems. For more about reading your IU email on a mobile device (a BlackBerry, iPhone, or PDA), see ARCHIVED: Reading your email on a mobile device. To read your iMail or uMail on your mobile phone, see Microsoft's Imail Mobile Sync page or Google's Umail Google Sync page.

Setting a preferred address and reading all your email there

If you have multiple email accounts, you can choose one to be your primary or preferred account, and then have all your email forwarded from your other accounts to the preferred account.

The university reserves the right to send official communications to students by email with the full expectation that students will receive email and read these messages in a timely fashion. Official university communications will be sent to students' official university email addresses; see Information about official communications from the university to students.

Using email

Your email address

Your email address is a combination of your IU username and your campus email domain. For example, email addresses at IUB take the form username@indiana.edu, while those at IUPUI take the form username@iupui.edu.