Email submission and relaying
Email submission and relaying is a specialist service. It involves the process of transferring an email from one server to another for delivery.
- Email submission: for devices (like printers with scan-to-email) or software that needs to send emails but can't use Google's Gmail servers. This might be because they don't support Google's "Authenticated SMTP" protocol or because it's not suitable to embed a username and password.
- Email relaying: to transfer emails between external sources and a specialised mail system on campus. This is available by special and limited arrangement.
If you’re already running a private mail service and want to transition to the University’s central Gmail service, you can request a virtual email domain.
Key features
Email submission:
- Works with all mail clients connected to the campus network that support Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for submitting messages.
- Can be configured using various port numbers with authentication and encryption options.
Email relaying:
- Carries out a basic virus scan of email attachments.
- Accepts messages up to 34MB in size (approximately equivalent to a small message with a 20MB file attached) and relays them for onward delivery.
- Works with all mail server systems supporting SMTP for exchanging emails.
Access instructions
- Email submission is available to anyone – no request necessary.
- To request email relaying, please contact IT Services.
Available to system administrators
Email submission is available to anyone. Email relaying must be requested by the specialist mail system’s administrator.
Free to use
This service is free to use.
Additional information
Email submission service
Configure your software to connect to (in decreasing order of desirability):
- port number 587 (for TLS encryption with authentication)
- port number 465 (for pre-established SSL encryption with authentication)
- port number 25 (for unauthenticated connections, switchable to optional TLS encryption).
Email relaying service
The service exclusively uses port number 25.
This facility is an add-on to the email relaying service.
A virtual email domain can be set up to help you transition from a private mail server to the University’s central Gmail service.
We create this from a one-off snapshot of your users' current email addresses and map them to equivalent "@york.ac.uk" addresses. This enables you to decommission your private mail server and change to "@york.ac.uk" addresses, whilst ensuring the old form of your addresses continue to accept and deliver incoming messages.
We take a snapshot of your current email addresses and map them to new "@york.ac.uk" addresses. This allows you to decommission the private mail server and switch to using the new addresses, whilst still receiving emails sent to the old addresses.
Access instructions
- Email submission is available to anyone – no request necessary.
- To request email relaying, please contact IT Services.
Guides and help
How-to guides and set up
Contact for support
If you're experiencing technical issues and need advice, please contact IT Services.
Service commitments
We expect you to keep us informed about changes to your contact details.
For the email relaying service facility, you should inform us of any changes to a mail system setup, in particular to its DNS name and/or IP address.
For the virtual email domain hosting facility, we expect you to work with us periodically to review your list of email address mappings to identify and remove those no longer needed, and update any that are incorrect.
The following policies apply to all IT services provided by the University.
Availability
- This is a live service, available 24/7.
Request processing times:
- Creation, modification or removal of relaying for a specialist mail system on campus takes five working days.
- Creation, modification or removal of a virtual email domain and/or its address entries takes five working days.
Support
- This service is managed by IT Services.
- We are responsible for monitoring, identifying and fixing faults.
- Support is available during our opening hours.
Standards
- Our service performance and standards have been produced in consultation with our customers. We regularly monitor the delivery, performance and availability of facilities and services.
We appreciate feedback as it helps us review and continually improve our service.
Page last reviewed: 9 September 2024