External email forwarding being turned off 29 September 

On Thursday, 29 September, we will be removing the ability to create new email forwarding rules from Kent email addresses to most external domains.

• If you are a KMMS student or member of staff and currently forward your Kent email to your KMMS mailbox, this will continue to work.
• If you currently have a forwarding rule set up to forward your Kent email to an external provider such as Gmail, this will continue to work for the time being.

This change will not prevent you from emailing external addresses.

What do I have to do?

From 29 September you will not be able to set up any new email rules to automatically forward your emails to an alternative email address (external email domain), and you will receive an error message.

To minimise disruption, if you are already forwarding your Kent emails to another provider this will continue to work.

If you have difficulty getting access to your Kent email account please let us know.

This doesn’t work for me

If there’s a legitimate reason why you need to use email forwarding for your study / work, for instance that you spend time working with, or are on placement in another company or institution where you’re unable to check your Kent account, please complete this form to let us know. If there is a genuine need for you to use email forwarding we may be able to make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, we cannot make exceptions based purely on personal preference.

Why we making this change

We have to ensure the security of information related to our business; when an email is forwarded to an external provider we lose our ability to manage access to that information. This puts the University at an increased risk of a data breach. While we know that Kent students and staff take care when handling Kent data offsite, we need to be sure that the information is being held in a secure and compliant way. The only way we can ensure this is by keeping these emails in an environment we can control.

In addition, all Kent IT Accounts are protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA). This extra layer of security means that even if your Kent IT account credentials are compromised, an attacker will not be able to access information held on our services without authorisation via your additional authentication method. We understand that many third-party email providers also offer MFA services, but as this is not required, it is not something we can rely on.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this change causes, but hope you understand we need to make it to improve the data security and protection we offer our staff and students.