Technical Note - Forwarding VUW Email to ECS

Summary

ECS Staff (and some thesis students) at VUW have two email addresses. One has a domain part of @vuw.ac.nz. Email to that domain is stored on an outsourced cloud-based Microsoft Outlook platform and is administered by the university's Digital Solutions (DS) group. The other has a domain part of @ecs.vuw.ac.nz (or for SMS people, @sms.vuw.ac.nz). Email to that domain is stored and administered locally by ECS.

Some people may be happy to keep their two addresses separate and set their email client up to check both mailboxes.

Others may prefer to forward email from one address to the other and have all email sent to either VUW address stored in one place.

If you want to forward your ECS email to your @vuw.ac.nz address you can follow the instructions in our Email Forwarding technical note. The destination address would be FirstName.LastName@vuw.ac.nz.

If on the other hand you want to forward your @vuw.ac.nz email to your ECS mailbox you should follow the steps outlined in this technical note.

Details

1. Log on to your staff email account at http://outlook.com/vuw.ac.nz. You need to use your VUW staff login and password rather than your ECS login and password for this.
2. Once logged in click on the Settings menu (the "cog" on the green title bar).
3. Click on "Rules" in the list of settings categories (see note below if you are using the "old" Outlook UI).
4. Click on the "+" to add a new inbox rule
5. Give the new rule a name (eg: "Forward to ECS")
6. Select "[Apply to all messages]" from the "Add a condition" drop-down menu
7. Under "Add an Action" select "Redirect to" and then type your ECS/SMS address into the box.
8. Your ECS/SMS email address may now appear in a drop down selection, in which case you can select it from there. If it doesn't just continue typing your address and once complete click on "Use this address".
9. You can now optionally add another action to delete the message from your VUW mailbox. Note that if you don't do this email will continue to accumulate in your VUW inbox. If you do add a "delete" rule it may be listed before the redirect action, but don't worry - your email will still be redirected. Instead of adding a delete action you could select "Move to" and move the message to another folder or to your mail archive.
10. Finally click on "Save". This should take you back to the initial Rules page. Click on the 'X' in the top right hand corner and you should be returned to your inbox.

The above instructions assume that you are using the "new" Outlook UI. If you are using the "Old" one replace step 3 with "Select 'Mail' under 'Your app settings' and then select 'Inbox and sweep rules' under 'Automatic processing' from the left-hand sidebar".

There is an alternate way of forwarding email from the VUW Outlook server. Under "Settings" there is a "Forwarding" option. Although setting up forwarding that way may seem easier than defining an Inbox rule we have found it has some undesirable side-effects. Consequently we recommend the method described above.