E-Mail access

MGH / Partners Email

If you have gotten your Martinos Account since 2013 you DO NOT have an account on the Martinos Center email server. Email sent to your Martinos Center account address at @nmr.mgh.harvard.edu is forwarded to your MGH/Partners address. All users will eventually have their email boxes migrated to the MGH/Partners servers.

For instructions on accessing your MGH/Partners email see this page.

Martinos Center Email Server (for older accounts only)

A web page is available at the easy to remember address of:

  http://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

At this site you will find links to:

1. Read email through your web browser
2. Setup an Out-of-Office (aka vacation) reply
3. Setup email forwarding to another address
4. FileDrop -- a site to upload large attachments instead of mailing them
5. Change filter settings in Partners Gateway

Email Reader Settings

Incoming e-mail access is provided for Martinos Center research personnel via the IMAP remote mail access protocol over SSL. Remote mail agents such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Mac Mail all support this protocol. Configure your email client to use these settings:

Type:IMAP
Server: mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
SSL: on
Port: 993

Make sure to enable SSL (often found in advanced options). Eudora v5.1 claims to support SSL but it does not appear to work consistently. All email readers we know get the port right automatically, but if not the port for IMAP should be 993. Make sure any setting referring to a root folder is left blank (on the old server we had users set this to "mail")

Outgoing e-mail settings are

Server: mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu or smtp.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
Port: 465
SSL (or TLS): on
Login/Authentication: on/required (same user/pw as for incoming)
DO NOT turn on "Secure Password Authentication"

This should work from anywhere on the internet including a traveling laptop or home PC. In some programs, like evolution that do not have an explicit field for the port number, you can give the server as smtp.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu:465 to set the port.

WARNING: for some versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, you must use port 587 instead of 465.

Because of the use of SSL, your password and messages are encrypted during transmission in communications between our server and your email client. However, beyond that there is no further encryption of the message. So this is not a guarantee of the privacy of your correspondence. There are many third-party tools for message body encryption but unfortunately no clear standards yet. One option is Partner's SEND SECURE.

If you are getting messages about an invalid or insecure certificate then see these two FAQ items.

Pine and IMAP

For information on moving local pine folders into the mail server via IMAP and setting up pine to use them via IMAP, read this page.