Email Communication, Collaboration and Organiser

The department provided a Zimbra based email and calendaring system up to October 2025. In summer 2025 the Zimbra system was wound down and people migrated to the central university Nexus Microsoft 365 email and calendaring system.

The official email address of each person is of the broad format: firstname.lastname@unit.ox.ac.uk . Unit will typically be maths or a college for most people.

Some people will also have a college email address, or in some cases email addresses associated with other departments. All the personal email addresses for an individual on the Nexus system are part of a single mailbox. Whilst you can receive email to any of the addresses you can normally only send email from one address - your primary email address.

Outlook Web Access

Outlook Web Access (OWA) is the easiest way to access your email and calendar on the Nexus system. Simply use a web browser to access https://outlook.office.com/ and login using your SSO account details and MFA.

Other mail clients

It is also possible to configure other mail clients such as the Outlook desktop application, Apple Mail and Thunderbird. For more details see https://help.it.ox.ac.uk/how-to-configure-your-email-client

Junk Mail

See the separate page on junk email.

Deleted Items automatic emptying

Please be aware that items in Deleted Items are automatically removed after 120 days via an overarching retention policy that cannot be changed on an individual level.

Backups

Please be aware the Nexus system does not provide backups of user mailboxes and calendars. As such if an item is deleted and no longer recoverable via the deleted items folder then it is generally not recoverable!

Shared/Role based mail and calendaring

Most commonly for various administrative processes there are shared/role based mailboxes. Adding and removing permission for others to such mailboxes is an entirely manual process (unlike the previous automated system the department was able to run for Zimbra).

Once permissions are in place for you to access a shared mailbox then you can do so in OWA via 2 different methods:

Method 1 - open the shared mailbox as a separate browser tab

In OWA:

click on your initials in the top right corner of the screen
from the menu that appears select 'open another mailbox'
in the dialogue that appears start typing the name of the mailbox/account, or its email address, such that it shows in a list of possible mailboxes
select the relevant mailbox and click on the open button

The role based mailbox now opens in its own tab so you can operate it in parallel to your personal mailbox.

For some this separate approach may be inconvenient for day to day use but is necessary if one needs to change any settings on the shared mailbox, e.g. setting an out of office message via the mailboxes own cog settings button near the top right.

Method 2 - show the shared mailbox folder list and calendar within your normal mailbox/calendar view

In OWA:

hover over your email address at the top of the mail folders list and click on the 3 dots that appears
in the menu that appears choose 'add shared folder or mailbox'
in the dialogue that appears start typing the name of the mailbox/account, or its email address, such that it shows in a list of possible mailboxes
select the relevant mailbox and click on the open button

The shared mailbox should now appear at the bottom of your mail folders list on the left so you can view all the shared mail folders together with your personal mail folders.

To further allow you to select which email address you send from when using your personal mailbox login you should also:

click on the cog near the top right and go into the 'Email -> Compose and reply' settings
within those settings make sure you have 'always show from' ticked

If the shared mailbox calendar is also used and you wish to show that within your personal calendar view you additionally need to:

access the shared mailbox using method 1 above
open the calendar tab in the shared mailbox
click on the calendar name in the list on the left and click on the 3 dots to get a menu
from that menu select 'sharing and permissions' and in the dialogue that appears share the calendar with your personal nexus account

If you then reload your personal nexus account calendar view you should now see this additional calendar in the calendar list under a 'People's calendars' section. You can thus tick/untick it to show it as and when you wish. You can also click on the calendar and from the 3 dots menu set a different colour for these calendar entries so you can easily distinguish them from ones in your personal calendar.