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Zimbra Nexus Migration

Following on from the announcement to department members on 8/8/2024 that Maths Zimbra email would migrate to the central university Nexus system, and the subsequent messages that there were delays, the migration is now scheduled to take place by the end of summer 2025. 

Nexus is the University’s instance of the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service, providing email, calendaring, and access to a range of other Office 365 applications.

The departmental migration involves ~1000 mailboxes and will be broken up into 5-10 batches. The migration will begin with graduate student mailboxes, with a first batch of ~50 people in March, and 2-3 subsequent batches running through April and May. The migration will then proceed with other mailboxes in further batches leading to an expected project completion in the summer vacation.

The stages of the migration (some of which will come with email reminders/notifications) are:

  1. ~1 week before migration: validation email confirming your Zimbra and Nexus account names and the week of your migration + review guidance on any preparatory checks or steps you should take before your migration; most notably disabling any mailbox rules you may already have in place on your Nexus account
  2. week of migration: your Zimbra mailbox contents are now being periodically synced by IT Services (likely daily) over to Nexus365 and an initial sync has begun (but that syncing continues to periodically run)
  3. week after migration: confirmation the email migration is complete, all your Maths email now goes immediately into Nexus and your Zimbra mailbox is now static (while the rest of the migration for other people completes after which that system will be closed down)
  4. update of default sending address on Nexus to be the Maths address if requested (and by default it was a college one previously)
  5. Manually migrate your Zimbra calendar to Nexus if you wish to

In the unlikely event that IT Services have an issue migrating your mailbox this would be alerted to you and in an extreme case your migration may be halted and you moved to a future batch to allow time for further investigation.

Potential actions required of you before and at the point of migration

Preparatory action/checks required by you for step 2

Prior to your mailbox migration there are some preparatory checks and actions you may need to take. This will be covered in step 2 above, but the key information is also available here for reference or to see further in advance.

  • Consider whether you are already using your Nexus email for another purpose at the University (e.g. another role or affiliation). 
    Only one Nexus mailbox is provided per individual user/SSO, so if you have already been using your Nexus365 email for another purpose at the University (e.g. College email), your Maths related emails will be added to this. You may therefore wish to take some extra steps to prepare, e.g. if you have matching mail folder names in both accounts but do not want those messages all to be in one single folder after the migration.
  • Even if you do not currently directly use your Nexus mailbox you may have at some point in the past setup rules on that mailbox to assist in the management of information that flows through that account, e.g. retaining copies of Teams meeting invites but potentially deleting copies of any other messages that end up in that Nexus mailbox - in this case it is particularly important that you disable those Nexus mailbox rules prior to your migration.
  • Your official Maths email address is of the form @email . If not already doing so you are strongly advised to switch to this format, that has been the default for ~20 years, as soon as possible, and advise any contacts or change your address in other systems in advance of the migration if they use some other format of email address for you in Maths.
  • If you are an academic and do not have an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) profile already, you may wish to set one up to help people find your latest details: https://orcid.web.ox.ac.uk/ 

Checking and disabling/removing problematic Nexus mailbox rules

  • Follow the instructions on this page to log in https://www.it.ox.ac.uk/use-nexus365-email ; basically login with your SSO account at https://outlook.office.com .
  • Now click on the settings cog towards the top right of the page.
  • In the settings dialogue that appears click on the Rules tab.
  • If you have any rules review them: use the slider for each rule to disable it as appropriate, or delete the rule if it is no longer needed. This is particularly important if you have added rules in the past to delete incoming messages that are not Teams invites say (as if this is in place when your migration sync occurs the rule will be applied to the incoming copy of the message and so it will not stick in your Nexus mailbox - as such when you check you Nexus mailbox you would find content missing and your sync would need to be rearranged for a future date after confirming the rule is no longer in place).

Folder clashes or other folder considerations

If you have a folder structure in Nexus that overlaps with that in your current Maths Zimbra account, then any matching folders will become merged on migration. If you do not want that to happen then in advance of the migration you should rename the folder at one or other end so they no longer clash.

If more generally you want to keep your existing Nexus mail in a separate folder tree to your Maths mail then you would need to restructure one or both accounts in advance. E.g. you could create a folder in Nexus called 'College Email' and move all your existing mail folders under that so they stay separate from all the Maths folders (other than the inbox) that are synced over. You could go further and similarly restructure your Zimbra mail folders so they all sit under a folder called 'Maths Email' such that it follows that structure when synced to Nexus.

Action required at the point of migration, step 2

Once you receive the notification that your mail has been synced to Nexus you need to then login to your Nexus mailbox and check it appears as you would expect. In the first instance it is recommended that you do this via the web interface to Nexus by logging in with your SSO account at https://outlook.office.com . 

There are log files that enable monitoring by IT Services of the migration process, and so it is unlikely that an issue would have gone unnoticed, but this is still recommended as an additional check. If there has been an issue, the sooner it is identified, the easier it will be to investigate and resolve. In the unlikely event you spot possible issues please report them promptly to @email so we can alert the university Nexus team.

Further action at the point migration is completed, step 4 and 5

Once you are content all is well you can if you wish proceed to configure specific mail clients to use as well as the web interface. Guidance for this is available at https://help.it.ox.ac.uk/how-to-configure-your-email-client . The IT Services helpdesk are also primed to supported such queries and provide the main point of contact for support issues with Nexus in general.

The migration process only handles email, not calendars. At this point if you use your Zimbra calendar then you need to manually transfer that using the following steps:

  1. First login at https://zimbra.maths.ox.ac.uk
  2. From Preferences -> Import/Export , in the Export section set the export type to Calendar and then use the source setting to select the calendar(s) you wish to export. Most people will just have one.
  3. Now press the export button at which point it will present you an ICS file to download.
  4. Now login to https://outlook.office.com
  5. Click on the calendar icon at the left to display your calendar.
  6. Click on the 'Add Calendar' link, choose the option to 'upload from file' and then when prompted select the ICS file downloaded in step 3.
  7. It will now import all the events from the ICS file

Further Information

Oxford email addresses and affiliations

  • By default if you have multiple affiliations (and hence multiple official format university email addresses for receiving mail) then the Nexus sending email address will typically be set to your college address (of the form @email) or other unit/department address. If you only have a Maths affiliation then your Nexus sending address will be set to your  @email address.
  • If your Nexus sending address is not the one you generally want and you have nominated your Maths address to be your primary address as part of the migration confirmation process, then this will be changed for you as part of each migration batch completes.
  • If you later decide your sending address is not the one you want then a request can be opened with the IT Services helpdesk who will change it for you.
  • In the longer term once all migrations and completed and other changes come it will become possible to select your the preferred email address at: https://register.it.ox.ac.uk
    • Go to Set, update or view Nexus mailbox settings.
    • Select Preferred email address settings.
    • Select your preferred email address.

Note in all the above the address that can be specified or selected can only be one of the official format addresses, i.e. typically the @email addresses allocated to you.

Note Nexus only supports a mailbox sending as a single address! If you have a need to send as multiple personal addresses (i.e. your department and college address) then a possible workaround advised by the university is to configure a mail client to send mail via the university SMTP server (where the client can then supports selecting different sending addresses on an email by email basis).

Spam filtering (impacts and settings)

Microsoft

  • The University has no control over Microsoft's in-built spam filtering rules, which are not documented or specified by Microsoft in a way that customers can easily understand. As a result, legitimate mail may occasionally end up in users' spam folders. Individual users do have some control over spam filtering by marking messages as spam or 'not spam,' which is useful for improving accuracy.
  • Information on how spam and junk email is processed, and how you can use junk email filters can be found here: https://help.it.ox.ac.uk/guidance-on-spam-and-junk-email 

The University

  • InfoSec’s webpage provides information on the current security measures the University applies to email, including filtering: https://infosec.ox.ac.uk/email 

  • The University's email security scanning system can act retrospectively, occasionally removing messages it deems harmful from a Nexus365 mailbox, even after they have been delivered and read.

    Information on how to access and check your Nexus365 quarantine and release email from it into your mailbox can be found here: https://help.web.ox.ac.uk/nexus365-email-quarantine 

  • If you notice this during your first use of your inbox after the migration, contact IT support. They can investigate whether this is due to an issue with the migration. 

Users

SMTP rate limits

Deleted Items (automated emptying)

  • In Nexus365 email, items in Deleted Items are automatically removed after 120 days via an overarching retention policy that cannot be changed on an individual level.

Mail Quotas

Short-form aliases

  • Short-form aliases (e.g. @email) are intended to continue to work in the short term after migration. However, these have not been the official listed/published email address for people for ~20 years and people should assume they will cease to work in the medium term.
  • Your Nexus mailbox similarly has a short form address of the form @email . This is similarly not the official listed/published email address for an individual and must not be assumed to persist in the long term.
  • If you are a researcher you may wish to create an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) profile to help communicate your latest details. For more information, see: https://orcid.web.ox.ac.uk 

Impact on support

  • Nexus related support requests can be raised with the central IT Services helpdesk via their form based support request system.
  • Departmental IT support will have no control over the Nexus service and very limited management tools to inspect issues. If you raise queries with departmental IT support they will advise where they reasonably can but may otherwise need to direct you to the IT Services helpdesk (or in more technically cases potentially log an issue on your behalf).



 

Last updated on 17 Mar 2025, 9:25am. Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page.