Students and staff from institutions participating in the University of Cambridge's Microsoft EES agreement can migrate their personal Hermes email accounts to Exchange Online.
Retired staff with a Hermes mailbox: The ISC is currently conducting a review of email provision for retired staff. You will receive further direct communications about how you may be affected once the review has concluded, but in the meantime, this page has been updated to reflect the current situation:
Factors to consider before migrating
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Please consult the institution-specific migration information or your College or Institution's support policy and advice before migrating. UIS is currently working with institutions to plan and schedule automated institution-wide migrations from Hermes to Exchange Online where they have requested it. Other institutions will expect you to self-migrate your own mailbox before 31 December 2021 when the Hermes email service is scheduled to close.
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This option is only for people's personal Hermes accounts, not shared mailboxes. Shared mailboxes should be migrated using UIS' bulk migration tool. Contact hermes.migration@uis.cam.ac.uk for details about scheduling bulk migrations.
IMPORTANT: Post-migration changes you need to understand
Once your migration to Exchange Online has completed:
1. All email to CRSid@hermes.cam.ac.uk will bounce
If you have been promoting the @hermes.cam.ac.uk domain as your email address, all email sent to CRSid@hermes.cam.ac.uk will bounce. The sender will receive the following automated response:
This message has not been delivered as this user's email address has changed. Please resend your message to XXXX@cam.ac.uk and update your records.
2. Your Hermes mailbox will become view only
Your old Hermes mailbox will be locked when your migration completes. You will be able to log in to it to view the contents, but you will not be able to make changes or send email from it. It is important to bear this in mind if you have used your @hermes.cam.ac.uk email address as the primary and/or recovery email address for any online accounts.
3. You should stop using smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk
You should stop using smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk and remove the Hermes configuration profile from all your email clients. (PC, laptop, tablet, smart phone, etc.)
- Users who communicate using PGP-encrypted emails should be aware that Exchange will often rewrite the Content-Type header. This may prevent PGP-enabled clients from automatically detecting the encrypted mail. It should be possible to manually tell the client the email is a PGP-encrypted message and then proceed to decrypt it as normal.
- For Thunderbird users, we recommend using the TbSync and Exchange ActiveSync plugins with Exchange Online. See: Set up Thunderbird.
- Mailing lists whose recipients resolve to @cam addresses will not need to be changed.
- Migrations from Exchange On Premise must be handled as part of a scheduled institutional migration plan. Computer Officers should contact Hermes.Migration@uis.cam.ac.uk to discuss this.
Important pre-flight checks
How to self-migrate your personal Hermes account
The migration process is easy to do yourself, using the Hermes Migration Tool. The process happens in two phases, so you can continue to use your Hermes email while your inbox is copied over in the background so there's no downtime.
Hermes migration instructions >
Note: Alumni must follow the Alumni Hermes migration instructions.
How to access your Exchange Online mailbox
Once you have migrated your Hermes account, you can access your new Exchange Online email account using the Outlook Web App (OWA) webmail interface in your browser and/or by configuring your chosen email client:
Configure your own email client:
- Outlook (for Windows, macOS and mobile devices)
- Apple Mail
- Thunderbird
- iOS
- Other email clients
Help and support
- Microsoft online support >
- Training resources >
- Personal help is available from the UIS Service Desk
