The official email system for UMN is the umn.edu gmail system. We do still run an in-house Physics mail system, primarily to support mailing list and some other collaborative features, but it is not supported as a “critical” system - problems will be addressed on a “best effort” basis.

By default when we create physics unix accounts, we now forward email by default to umn.edu. However you can enable your physics mailbox via MyPhys > Physics Email Status & Forwarding. You may need this, for example, if you need to access physics-only mail features such as internal shared/group mailboxes.

You can access your physics mail through our webmail system. The webmail system also lets you control many features of your email account, such as filtering messages to different folders. You can read more information about it here. <note> The old physics squirrelmail interface is not recommended, but can still be accessed here </note>

For most people, the best way to use your Physics email account is with a program such as Thunderbird to access your mail using our IMAP server.
Check out our instructions on setting up your Thunderbird client

You can also use your mail account by logging in to the Unix system interactively and running one of the available mail programs, such as alpine or mutt. alpine is mostly preconfigured to work correctly on physics linux systems.

Note, if your linux machine is outside of PAN, you will have to configure authenticated SMTP to send mail

We don't put any particular limit on the size of email messages you can receive. Other mail systems may prevent delivery of large files, and the webmail system may have trouble with very large attachments.

The size of your mailbox overall is subject to a quota limit, which is generally set between 5-10GB. You can see your current usage and quota by visiting MyPhys. If you go over this limit then further email deliveries will be deferred until you reduce your usage.

If you only want to read your mail in one place, we have directions for forwarding your mail to or from physics, with specific examples for umn.edu mail.

• Mail forwarding & Vacations
• Organizing mail with folders
• Spam control
• Offline access to messages
• Shared mailboxes
• Adding additional identities (multiple from addresses)

More about mailing lists available to Physics users