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:
- Your Helix email address (user@helix.nih.gov) will continue to work;
CIT will automatically forward new messages into your Exchange INBOX.
- CIT will copy your existing Helix email messages to specially named
folders (HELIX-INBOX, HELIX-mail-folders, and/or HELIX-other-folders)
in your Exchange mail account.
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.