From 1.10.2018 onward all forwarding of emails for recipient domains @cip.ifi.lmu.de and @stud.ifi.lmu.de ( and the corresponding long format informatik.uni-muenchen.de) to external mail providers will be discontinued.

All email sent to these addresses will then only be delivered to the local mailbox residing on the mailsystem of the IfI. The emails can be read there. The only exceptions will be forwards within the IfI and CIS.

Reason for this decision

There are tree reasons for this decision.

Fewer and fewer (external) mail providers accept forwards and a rising number have announced such actions for the near future. By accepting only emails sent directly from the owner of the originating mail domain they aim to achieve two results. Firstly this should improve the proof of authenticity of emails and secondly it should reduce SPAM.

Forwarding emails negatively impacts the reputation of our mail system. Mail providers use this reputation (e.g. through blacklists) to determine if SPAM might originate from our mail system. This can even lead to a complete rejection of all mail from our system. The reason for the negative impact is that all our anti SPAM meassures notwithstanding a small amount of SPAM still gets forwarded.

External mail providers sometimes reject mails from our system because of reasons like unknown recipient, mailbox full, technical issues etc. But a lot of our services are dependant on a functioning email reception.

What does this mean for me?

This change is not as bad as it first appears to be. Most good mail clients have a feature which transparently integrates mail from different mail accounts into one virtual mailbox. Just google for your mail client and terms like “unified inbox”, “unified folder” or “global inbox”.