Forwarding NU Email to Another Address
Why would I want to forward my email?
Most of the students in our program already have email addresses of their own -- from work, from previously attended universities, from various ISPs (like comcast), or from free web-based accounts (like yahoo). Checking multiple email addresses can be inconvenient, especially if you intend to keep your previous email address after leaving Northwestern.
However, important announcements will be sent periodically to your NU email address (both from our program specifically and from the university in general), and it is important not to miss these messages.
Fortunately, by using NU's online directory system (ph), you can easily forward any email sent to your @northwestern.edu email address to a different email address of your choice -- that way, you only need to check one email account, and you don't have to worry about missing anything.
Accessing/Logging In to ph
In order to get to the login page for ph, go to:
http://directory.northwestern.edu
From this page, you can look up contact information for anyone (faculty, staff, or student) at Northwestern simply by entering his or her name into the search field. For reasons of privacy, more information will be available to you if you are searching the directory from a computer at NU's campus than if you are checking from a computer off-campus.
In order to modify your own information, click the "Edit Your Directory Information" link, which is to the right of the search box. You will be prompted for your netid and password. This is the same netid and password combination that you use for virtually everything at Northwestern: to check your email, register for classes via CAESAR, login to computers at the public labs on campus, and so forth. Please keep in mind that NU requires you to change your netid password every 180 (approximately once a quarter). If you allow your password to expire, you will be unable to access ph until you reset your password (which requires a trip to the Information Center at Kresge Hall).
Forwarding Your Email
After clicking on the login button, you will be taken to a rather busy-looking page which lists all of the fields and values in the ph directory for you. For the purposes of forwarding your email, the field that concerns you is "mailbox." When you first login, the mailbox field will be set to your NU email account -- abc123@merle.it.northwestern.edu, for instance.
To change this, click the "mailbox" link. On the new screen, enter in the email address where you want your mail to be forwarded, and then click the "Change" button. That's it -- it's pretty painless. There is not a logout button in the ph directory, so make sure to quit your web browser when you are done modifying your mailbox.
Once this is done, mail sent to your @northwestern.edu email address will automatically be forwarded to whatever email account you listed in the mailbox field.
Other fields in ph
The mailbox is not the only field in ph which you can modify. You can also modify contact information (such as phone numbers and addresses), determine just how available you want your information to be to people who are using non-NU computers, list a web page (if you have one), and so forth. There is also a field (the very first one) called "alias." The alias is the portion of your email address which appears before the @northwestern.edu. By default, NU uses first intial-last name (p-rodriguez). If you have a common name, there may be a number attached to your alias (a-lee7). If you do not like the default alias, you may change it to whatever you like -- as long as nobody else at NU is currently using that alias. In other words, you can't choose shg as your alias, because that already belongs to Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon.
It is important to note that if you change your address or phone number in ph, that only changes what people see when they look you up in the online directory. It does not change your record in student accounts, or your information in the MSED Program's internal databases.