How to redirect your student mail

by Stefan Knapen on April 16, 2010

: Image via CrunchBase

What are you doing with your student mail at the moment? Checking it every once in a while? Do you treat it as just another inbox where you need to go to and check if you have a new email and if not, have to logout again? That was what I used to do, until I wanted to reduce the number of inboxes I have, so I hacked my student mail inbox.

Why should you hack your student mail inbox?
I’ve hacked my inbox for one reason. To cut down the number of inboxes I have. With the student mailbox I only got emails from my professors and spam emails about the events that are going to happen around my faculty. So I would check that inbox around three times a day, just to see another spam mail most of the times. Not very effective.

Besides that, sending messages from student mail doesn’t work for me. It is different from Gmail and I don’t like the font. Making another address book, another archive and other filters just didn’t seem logic to me. So I hacked it!

How to hack your student mail
What I did was redirecting my student mail to my Gmail account. A pretty easy task in CommuniGate Pro, because you can edit that really easy. Push one button, fill in your email address and you are done! From now on, I get all my emails in my google mail, where I want to have them.

The second thing was setting up a couple of filters. I want to have my messages from professors and fellow student to my normal inbox, because those are important enough. But a message about the next workshop you can enroll isn’t that important to me, so I filtered that out. (Most of the times those emails are send to everyone as a BCC, so just grab the email address they send it to and make a filter in that way!)

The last thing I did was adding my student mail account to my gmail, so if I have to send an email to a professor now, I can still use my student mail address, in stead of my regular address. An easy thing to do in Gmail!

A tutorial
Hard to follow? Here is a little video I made about the process! (Sorry for the poor audio and there is a little problem with the sync, I’ll update it soon!)