E-Mail

At present, the univerity’s e-mail solution is Microsoft Exchange for most staff and Office 365 for students.

Using Outlook web access

The easiest way to access your e-mail (and calendars and contacts) is to use Outlook web access:

Using GNOME / Evolution

The next easiest way to access your e-mail (and contacts) is to use the e-mail client in GNOME - evolution. The fastest way to set it up is to open Settings and click Online Accounts.

  • Click “Add an online account”
  • Choose “Microsoft Exchange”
  • Enter the E-Mail as yourusername@soton.ac.uk
  • Enter your normal university password

Open Evolution and your e-mail account will have automatically been created.

Using other clients

If you decide to use another e-mail client you’ll likely want to use IMAP and SMTP for sending and receiving e-mails. The support in Microsoft Exchange for IMAP clients is very poor however (performance is appauling and the IMAP server is not very compliant to the RFC - surprising, no?). We thus recommend either using Outlook Web Access or Evolution, but if you really do want to take the plunge, here are the details:

  • IMAP server: imap.exchange.soton.ac.uk
  • IMAP security: SSL/TLS (port 993)
  • SMTP server: smtp.soton.ac.uk
  • SMTP security: STARTTLS (port 25)