Email

Data Science Gmail - @ds.dfci.harvard.edu

Email Aliases & Distribution Lists - @ds.dfci.harvard.edu

Data Science Gmail - @ds.dfci.harvard.edu

As of May 2019, all Data Science staff have a Google Workspace / Gmail account with an address in the format:

[username]@ds.dfci.harvard.edu

The Google account is HIPAA compliant and includes essentials such as mail, calendar, and drive. It's encouraged to utilize your Gmail account rather than your Partners MGB DFCI email as we will have more ability to support you. Please note the total user quota for all Google applications (Drive, Gmail, etc.) is 30GB.

To access your Gmail inbox, please go to https://mail.google.com and sign in with the username you were provided at [username]@ds.dfci.harvard.edu.

You can access all your Google applications by clicking the ‘Google apps’ button (3x3 dots next to the DFCI logo in the top right corner) and selecting an app.

If you can read this site in the first place, you are most likely already logged in!

Partners Email - @dfci.harvard.edu

Your Partners email address corresponds to a Microsoft Office365 account, and will have the following format:

Firstname_Lastname@dfci.harvard.edu

It is important to check your Partners email account, as you may receive important emails from groups / leadership at DFCI outside of Data Science. You can check your Partners email on the web at outlook.office365.com or configure it in an email client such as Microsoft Outlook.

It is no longer possible to access your Partners mailbox from Thunderbird. Please access your Partners email through a web browser, as shown in the screenshots below:

Go to the login page and enter your DFCI email address in the following format:

2. Enter your MGB username (initials + number) and corresponding password:

3. You're in!

Note that you can access other Office 365 web applications from this view as well, such as OneDrive and Teams.

Email Client Support

The Systems team is happy to support Data Science staff with the usage of select mail clients (programs for viewing your inbox) on compliant devices. The mail clients we can readily support are:

Gmail - Web interface for DS Gmail account.
- Gmail for iOS - For those already using Gmail on iOS, you can add your DS gmail account to your iOS app (even if it's already using another address) and switch between the two as needed. There is also a Google Calendar app for iOS that integrates with your Gmail.
Microsoft Outlook for MacOS and Windows (as part of the DFCI Microsoft O365 Suite) - compatible with both Partners MGB and DS Gmail account(s).
- Microsoft Outlook for iOS - Advisable to configure on desktop first, but mobile app is compatible with both accounts as well.
O365 Outlook Web App - Web interface for Partners MGB (dfci.harvard.edu) email inbox.

Please reach out to us if you encounter any issues with the mail clients above, or if you are using a different one not listed here that you are unable to troubleshoot on your own and we may be able to assist.

Email Aliases & Distribution Lists - @ds.dfci.harvard.edu

When contacting groups of colleagues and staff, we often rely on email aliases. For internal communications, these are typically created as Google Groups which can be managed independently by the owner(s) and manager(s) of each one.

To view which aliases you belong to individually, you can click here to go to My Groups. Depending on the configuration of each one, you can do things like viewing other members, changing your preferences, and if you're a manager or owner then there's an abundance of other settings that can affect everyone who's a member.

Some aliases contain other aliases, called nesting. An example of this would be ds.all@ds.dfci.harvard.edu containing several groups as members, including ds.clsb -- which at the time of writing has 174 members!

If you need to determine the nested groups / aliases that you or a colleague is a part of, please inquire with Systems via email and we can do some back-end magic on our side to traverse nested aliases and get the full information without anyone needing to review dozens of membership lists manually.

For more information on creating and managing Google Groups to employ them as mail aliases, please refer to Google's documentation.

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