Frequently Asked Questions about the student mailbox

You will see your email address at the top left next to the current date when you are logged into Surfmail.

The email address displayed is that of your default identity. If you have not set up your own “identity,” your primary email address will always be used automatically.

You can also find your email address in the welcome email that you received at the beginning of your studies at your student email address.

If you have changed your name (e.g., after marriage), please first contact the Counseling and Administration Office at the Campus Center. Only after the name change has been made in STiNE should you contact the RRZ ServiceLine.

If you have multiple first names but do not want all of them to appear in your email address, please contact the RRZ ServiceLine.

The student mailbox is available to you as long as you are enrolled at the University of Hamburg.

After completing your studies or upon de-registration, the mailbox remains active for 14 days so that you can save important emails. After that, the mailbox is deactivated and, unless you re-enroll within 6 months, deleted.

If you take up employment at UHH during or after your studies, a second mailbox will be set up for you in the employee email system. The lifetime of your student mailbox depends exclusively on your studies.

Student employees receive a second mailbox on the “Exchange” employee mail system in addition to their “Public” student mailbox for the following reasons:

• Separation of student and professional activities: One mailbox on the student email system is used for your student activities, while the other mailbox on the employee email system is intended for your professional tasks at the University of Hamburg.
• Different requirements and access rights: Student and professional activities often require different access rights and security measures. Separating the mailboxes makes it easier to meet these requirements and simplifies administration.
• Data protection and compliance: Separating mailboxes can also help to meet data protection and compliance requirements, especially when certain data or information must remain separate.

For technical reasons, not all student emails can be sent to your student mailbox. For this reason, you will occasionally find emails related to your studies in your staff mailbox. To ensure that these remain available even after your UHH employment contract expires, please move the emails to your student mailbox. This can be done easily using an email program such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple Mail on a work computer if both mailboxes are integrated. Alternatively, you can also forward the email to your student mailbox via the OWA web interface.

It is advisable not to set up a general forwarding of all emails from one mailbox to the other in order to maintain the separation described above.

What you need to do in this case depends on whether it is an internal UHH service or an external service in the cloud.

UHH internal services

If your email address is deleted and you have used it to register for internal UHH services, you usually do not need to do anything else. Internal services are usually connected to the central directory service and are automatically updated as soon as your email address is changed. You can assume that your email communication and access rights within the internal system will remain intact without you having to take any further action.

Examples of UHH internal services are:

• RRZ Service Portal
• STINE
• cloud.uni-hamburg.de (Nextcloud)
• Sharepoint

External services

If your email address is deleted but was used to register for external services, we strongly recommend that you update your email address with these services. This will ensure that you continue to receive important notifications and can access your accounts. Log in to each service where you have used your email address and update your account settings with your new email address. This will ensure that your communication is not interrupted and that you retain access to your accounts.

Examples of external services in the cloud are:

• Office365 in the Microsoft Cloud

Special features/exceptions

• Office365: In the Microsoft Office 365 service for the University of Hamburg, the email address is currently used as the login username. Unfortunately, this cannot be changed in the self-service portal and is not automatically updated. Therefore, if your login email address is no longer valid, you must open a ticket with the RRZ ServiceLine requesting that your login ID be changed to your new email address at the University of Hamburg. We are working to improve the service so that this will no longer be necessary in the future.

An email may be no larger than 50 MB, including attachments.

Your student mailbox has a capacity of 2 GB.

• Log in to Surfmail. A status bar will show you the current usage of your mailbox.
• If you use the Thunderbird mail client, you can check your storage space usage by selecting “Properties” from the context menu of the ‘Inbox’ and then opening the “Quota” tab.
• For Microsoft mail clients, select the inbox and right-click. Then select Properties from the context menu. In the General tab, you can view the quota by clicking the Folder Size button.

With your student email account, you can send a maximum of 100 emails per hour.

See Forwarding Surfmail.

• If the forwarding destination is a GMX email account, please change the very strict anti-spam settings in your GMX settings.
• Due to the detour via the university, emails may be considered spam by various providers, especially AOL. Check your spam folder in your inbox.
• For these reasons, among others, the RRZ recommends not setting up any forwarding!

Every day, thousands of emails are sent from the University of Hamburg's mail server to Google Mail accounts. There are no technical problems as such. Unfortunately, however, a large number of students have activated email forwarding on their university email accounts.

An example:

An email from firstname.lastname@gmx.de is sent to good.student@studium.uni-hamburg.de, who forwards it to his private good.student@googlemail.com-Mailbox.

Email forwarding forwards EVERYTHING that comes into the mailbox without filtering. This includes unwanted advertising emails, aka SPAM. It then looks as if the University of Hamburg email address is sending emails from GMX. For Gmail, this makes the University of Hamburg appear to be a SPAM sender. As a result, Gmail occasionally blocks emails from the University of Hamburg. However, any blocking by Google is only temporary.

Incidentally, a simple way to permanently solve the problem is for students to integrate their student email account directly into their email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail, etc.), which eliminates the need for forwarding.

To ensure data security in email traffic, we do not process potentially dangerous file attachments. This applies, for example, to .doc, .xls, ppt, .exe, and .dll files. When attempting to deliver a critical email, you will automatically receive a response informing you of the rejected email attachment. Please convert Office documents to a modern file format such as .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx.

List of prohibited file types:

ace, ade, adp, ani, app, arj, asp, bas, bat, cab, ceo, cer, chm, cla, class, cmd, cnt, com, cpl, cur, dll, doc, docm, dot, exe, exe-ms, fxp, gadget, grp, hlp, hpj, hta, ins, iso, isp, its, Izh, jar, job, js, jse, lnk,, mad, maf, mag, mam, maq, mar, mas, mau, mav, maw, mcf, mda, mdb, mde, mdt, mdw, mdz, mhtml, msc, msh, msh1, msh1xml, msh2, msh2xml, mshxml, msi, msp, mst, ops, osd, pcd, pif, plg, pot, potm, ppa, ppam, pps, ppsm, ppt, pptm, prf, prg, ps1, ps1xml, ps2, ps2xml, psc1, psc2, pst, reg, scf, scr, sct, shb, shs, vb, vbe, vbp, vbs, vs, vsd, vsmacros, vsw, vxd, ws, wsc, wsf, wsh, xbap, xla, xlam, xls, xlsb, xlsm, xlt, xnk

If there is no trash folder in the Surfmail folder view, please create one first. Then go to User Settings, click on Webmail, select “Delete and Move Messages,” check the box next to “Move deleted messages to the trash instead of marking them as deleted in the current folder,” and select the correct folder for your account under “Trash Folder.”

Click on “Other” in the top right corner and select “Show deleted”.

If not all folders are displayed in your account, please click on “Folder actions” in the left-hand side menu of the Surfmail interface and select “Show all folders”. This will resolve the issue.

Your email account has email addresses that you can use to send and receive emails. In Surfmail, an error message appears in a red box at the bottom right with the text “Sender address rejected: not owned by user” if you send an email using an email address that is no longer assigned to this account. This can happen if you have created identities in Surfmail, but the email address has been moved to the university Exchange servers when setting up an employee mailbox. In this case, delete the identity associated with the email address. You can find your identities in Surfmail under “User settings” -> ‘Webmail’ -> “Personal details.”