Forwarding Your KU Email

We strongly recommend that you do not auto-forward your KU email to an external personal email account. By doing so, you may miss important emails, and unintentionally compromise the security of both your personal device and confidential KU information or data.

In the past several years, numerous email service providers, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and cable internet providers, have implemented a system called DMARC to help prevent spam and phishing emails. (Read more about DMARC below.) Unfortunately, this verification system can reject legitimate emails that are auto-forwarded to another account.

If you choose to set up auto-forwarding on you KU email account, a copy of all forwarded messages will be retained in your KU mailbox until you delete them. This will help ensure you do not lose important emails you might otherwise miss.

Important Notes:

  • You must periodically log in to your KU email account to check and delete emails.
  • If you do not regularly delete emails in your KU mailbox, it will become full and new incoming emails will be blocked.
  • You will not be notified when your mailbox is full, unless you log in to your KU email account.
  • You should log in to your KU mailbox at least once a week to check for missed emails and delete any unneeded messages.

About DMARC

In short, Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC) is an email authentication process designed to verify that emails are actually coming from the stated sender. If the sender cannot be verified by DMARC, the message may be rejected. This helps stop spam and phishing messages from reaching your inbox. For more detailed information, visit DMARC.org.

Take for example, Tonia, who has set up auto-forwarding to send her ku.edu email to a Yahoo account. When a friend sends an email from a Google account to Tonia’s ku.edu address, it is auto-forwarded to Yahoo. As a result of the redirect, the message appears to originate from ku.edu, but the “from” information still says Google. Because of this mismatch, Yahoo rejects the email message.

Problems of rejected messages also can occur with non-KU email accounts where you have set up auto-forward. For example, if you are forwarding email from a cable provider account to a Gmail account. To prevent loss of emails, we encourage you to re-evaluate email forwarding. Most email programs and mobile devices allow you to set up and check multiple email accounts in one place. For example, this Microsoft support article provides guidance for setting up multiple email accounts in Outlook.