Setting Up and Using Your Hopkins E-mail

There are two types of email accounts that you may need to use. Your Johns Hopkins Enterprise Mail (JHEM) email account is the email account that is every student is assigned. A WebCT email account is an email account you are assigned when you register for or teach an online course.

Your JHEM email
Your WebCT email

Your JHEM email

By default, your JHEM email is [your login ID]@jhed.jhu.edu. To use this email account you must first activate your JHED ID. To accomplish this, you may wish to follow our tutorial for Activating your Johns Hopkins Enterprise Directory (JHED) Login. If you encounter problems accesssing your JHEM account, contact the Help Desk at 410-516-HELP.

You can access your JHEM email via two methods:

1) Log into the student portal at my.jhu.edu or my.johnshopkins.edu. Click the "JHEM" icon or the "Inbox" link of the Email preview channel. This will launch your web-based email client.

Accessing your JHEM email through the portal

2) You can also access your JHEM email by pointing your browser directly to jhem.jhu.edu or jhem.johnshopkins.edu. You will need to log in with your JHED ID and password.

JHEM email log-in screen

Additionally you can:
Set up e-mail aliases (easy to remember alternatives to your default email address) to use.
Set up a desktop e-mail client, such as Outlook or Eudora, to access your email.
Learn more about JHEM email by visiting the Hopkins IT website.

Your Web CT email

WebCT is the software system used to participate in online courses. When you sign up for an online course, you are assigned a WebCT email. Many third-party email accounts, such as those provided by Yahoo and AOL, block course-related email, marking it as "junk email" or "spam". For this reason, we require students taking fully-online courses to use a WebCT email account for all course-related correspondence.

WebCT email isn't an email account in the conventional sense. A more appropriate description would be that it is an internal messaging system used only by WebCT. This means that emails are sent, received, and stored only within WebCT rather than in an external email account like Yahoo. If you'd like, you can set up email forwarding so that class messages sent to your WebCT email are forwarded to your external email account. However, mail forwarding will only allow you to receive messages in your external account, not reply to them. To reply, you will need to log in to your WebCT course and send an email using the built-in email system.

Some advantages of this internal WebCT email system are:

Email from the WebCT course doesn't get mixed in with personal or work-related email.
Instructors and students don't have to keep track of all students' email addresses.

Every student is required to take an online orientation course before you begin your first online course. During this orientation, you will be instructed on how to use and administer your WebCT email account. If you have any questions, call the Johns Hopkins campus help desk at 410-516-6496.