Helix Email to be Retired / Migrated to Exchange

The Helix email service will be discontinued by January 31, 2018 to comply with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) and other security mandates. We understand that this is a significant change for users who have used Helix email for many years, and we are working to make the transition as seamless as possible. When the Helix email service is discontinued, the following will occur:

Frequently Asked Questions

If you have concerns or questions that are not covered in this FAQ, please contact NIH HPC (Helix/Biowulf) staff at staff@helix.nih.gov

Will my Helix email address (username@helix.nih.gov) break? I have published papers that refer to this email address.

No. All username@helix.nih.gov addresses will be forwarded to your official NIH Exchange email address. This will be permanent.

What will happen to the old email that I have stored in folders on Helix?

CIT will copy your existing Helix email messages to your Exchange mail account.

How will I know if I have email on Helix that will be migrated to my Exchange mail account?

If you have email on Helix that will be migrated to your Exchange mail account, you will be notified multiple times by the HPC staff before your mail is migrated. The first notification will be a week before the email is migrated, then again 3 days in advance and finally 1 day in advance.

Will SquirrelMail go away?

Yes. After your Helix email has been migrated to Exchange you will no longer be able to use SquirrelMail to access email on Helix. However, an equivalent "Web mail" functionality for Exchange is supported in Outlook Web Access https://cloudmail.nih.gov.

Can my mail to my Helix email address (username@helix.nih.gov) be forwarded to my Gmail account or another non-Government address?

No. As per HHS policy (HHS Usage of Unauthorized External Information Systems to Conduct Department Business Memorandum, Jan 8, 2014), government email may not be auto-forwarded to a non-Government server.

Will all my mail folders be migrated?

Our automated process does not follow symbolic links. For most Helix users this won't matter; but if you know you have configured some of your mail folders as symlinks, please make arrangements with the HPC staff to have these folders migrated.

Our automated process also does not examine mail folders on your desktop machine. In most cases this will not matter, since the IMAP mail reading protocol normally preserves folders on Helix (the server side). However, POP users and IMAP users with highly customized configurations could be affected. If this is a concern (whatever method you use to access your desktop mail, e.g. offline mode, should continue to work, possibly with configuration tweaks), please contact the HPC staff to triage your situation.

Will my existing contacts/address book be migrated?

Since there is no standard addressbook format, the migration process does not support merging your present Helix address book into the Exchange mail system. You might, depending on your mail client, be able to export your contact/addressbook data as a CSV file, which Outlook might then be able to import. At this time we have no reports of such efforts, nor of their efficacy.

P.S. In the Outlook mail client, address lookups are integrated with the NIH Active Directory; so you might not need to "migrate" NIH addresses.

What should I be doing to prepare for the migration?

Please do test-read your Exchange mail in advance, using Outlook and/or Outlook Web Access https://cloudmail.nih.gov. Even if you have no mail in your Exchange mail account, this will verify that you can connect and authenticate to Exchange, and give you a taste of Outlook's look & feel.
"Missing Mail" after migration

To date there are no known instances of mail on Helix failing to migrate to Exchange as expected. However, where to find the migrated mail is not always obvious. Here are some known scenarios:

I don't see any new helix.nih.gov mail in my HELIX-INBOX.

Newly arriving helix.nih.gov mail will be merged into your Outlook INBOX. HELIX-INBOX only contains your old Helix messages.

I don't see any new mail on Helix.

N.B. IMAP and POP service will be unavailable to migrated users, so this scenario implies logging in (ssh) to Helix and using a local mail reader such as alpine.

Newly arriving helix.nih.gov mail is being forwarded to your Exchange mail account, so you should be using Outlook (or OWA) to read them. Helix holds only (copies of) your pre-migration messages, but these are now available in Outlook too; trying to read mail on Helix is now both redundant (previously existing Helix mail is duplicated in Exchange) and incomplete (new messages exist only in Exchange).

HELIX-INBOX looks fine; but I don't see any messages in HELIX-mail-folders nor HELIX-other-folders.

You should expand HELIX-mail-folders and/or HELIX-other-folders by clicking on the triangle icon to the left of the folder name. This should display a list of subfolders, which may then be examined individually.

1. Click on the hollow, horizontally oriented arrow icon

2. There may be additional levels to expand

3. Finally, some actual mail folders!

I see my folder hierarchy under HELIX-mail-folders/mail, for example, but they're all grayed out: none seem to contain mail.

If your migration process is not yet complete, this is normal. The process first creates its target folders, which is what you're seeing. It then populates the folders message by message (but not folder by folder: multiple folders can be receiving messages in the same timespan). We don't know yet whether the migrated messages show up one at a time, or only when their parent folder is fully populated, or not until everything is done.

If you have received an email notice that your migration process is complete but you still only see "ghost" folders, then you should contact us at staff@helix.nih.gov.