Your Lorentz Institute email address has the form username@lorentz.leidenuniv.nl and can be accessed via a webmail service and/or trough your favourite email client. A set of temporary credentials (username and password) is usually emailed to your private email address within hours from the moment you are officially registered as a Institute member by the secretariat.

The easiest way to access your INBOX is via our webmail service. Open a browser and visit https://webmail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/. Alternatively you can set up your favourite email client on your personal device following the notes below.

Your Lorentz Institute email folders are also accessible via any email client supporting the IMAP and SMTP protocols with TLS/STARTTLS security according to the schemas below

Incoming server settings

Outgoing server settings

imap.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl and smtp.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl are aliases of mail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl

personal-name=Bingo Bongo
user-domain=lorentz.leidenuniv.nl
smtp-server=mail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/user=bbongo/ssl
inbox-path={mail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/user=bbongo/ssl}INBOX
default-fcc={mail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/user=bbongo/ssl}SENT
postponed-folder={mail.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/user=bbongo/ssl}POSTPONED

Please follow the instructions here.

Email forwarding can be easily set up either via the Lorentz Institute Account Services. Alternatively, the same result can be achieved by modifying .procmailrc in your home directory. In the latter case, see as a starting point the following examples.

If you want to keep on our servers a copy of your mail forwarded to another address, add

:0 c
! your_address@remoteserver.nl

If you want your mail forwarded to another address, without keeping a local (on our servers) copy add this

:0
! your_address@remoteserver.edu

Do not set up any forwarding rules in $HOME/.forward otherwise your emails might get blocked by other email providers, such as google, hotmail, etc..

The Lorentz Institute email server scans emails for viruses and spam. Nonetheless, it is possible that a few unwanted emails slip through our security mesh. Should the problem become unbearable (e.g. your INBOX is filled with tens of unwanted emails), please do not hesitate to contact the helpdesk.

TIP: Please collect all wanted and unwanted e-mails in ad hoc folders. This will help the system administrators `train' the anti-spam software to generate better spam tags.

As of April 2016, all emails received by the Lorentz Institute servers will have SPAM header tags. This can be of help in determining why a particular email was not tagged as spam and can help devise better filtering rules.

Do not ever click on links appearing in emails but rather manually write the URL you want to visit in your browser destination bar. This will make you more aware of the web destination you are trying to visit. Should you have any doubts about the legitimacy of an email, please do not hesitate to contact support@lorentz.leidenuniv.nl.

Your emails are stored clear text on our email servers or on any other destination server unless you encrypt them. If you care about privacy and if you handle sensitive information in your email correspondence we strongly advise you use encrypted emails. This is rather easy to set up following this guide. Both GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) and Thunderbird are installed on all IL workstations.

To email all Lorentz Institute members use the alias institute.

To email the procurement office use bestellingen.

Should you want to email all maris cluster users, please us the alias maris-users.

To contact the helpdesk it is preferable to use our web application.

Note: Append @lorentz.leidenuniv.nl to any alias above.

Computer support is generally available during working hours with the exception of emergency situations.

All Lorentz Institute users are encouraged to use the helpdesk to request help rather than emailing support. The reason why is simple. Our helpdesk application maintains a database of all present and past issues which greatly helps solving problems in the quickest way as possible. Moreover, while emails addressed to support are only read by a limited number of people, helpdesk tickets reach ALL computer workers in the Leiden University Observatory (STRW), Lorentz Institute (IL) and Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). This means that your issue can be resolved even though the IT personnel of your department is on vacation.