The academic webmail of Nantes as it existed until the end of 2025 is no longer accessible. Since January 12, 2026, the rectorate has permanently disabled the old academic webmail service as part of a national harmonization of messaging tools. The old URLs of the type webmel/iaXX (ia72, ia44, ia53) no longer point to any active server. For staff who did not export their messages before this date, the situation poses a concrete problem of data recovery.
Closure of the academic webmail Nantes: what has really changed
Confusion persists between a temporary outage and a permanent shutdown. Reports on incident tracking sites continue to flood in, but they often reflect a misunderstanding of the situation: the old webmail will not come back online.
The rectorate’s decision is part of a broader movement. All academies are gradually migrating to a single national platform, hosted at messagerie.education.gouv.fr. This portal now centralizes access to professional mailboxes, regardless of the department of attachment.
In practical terms, the academic identifiers remain the same ([email protected]), but the entry point has changed. Attempting to recover messages on the Nantes webmail via the old interfaces results only in a blank page or a certificate error.
National messaging education.gouv.fr: access to old messages
The migration to the national platform did not delete the content of mailboxes. Most staff can find their history by logging in to messagerie.education.gouv.fr with their usual credentials.
Several points deserve verification:
- Authentication now goes through the national portal and no longer through the academy’s CAS. If your password expired during the transition, a reset via the academic portal is necessary.
- Personalized folders (subfolders, labels) have not all survived the migration. Some users report a flattened folder structure, with messages grouped in the main inbox.
- Messages deleted before the migration do not appear on the new platform. Only messages present on the server at the time of transfer have been retained.
Field feedback varies on the completeness of the migration. Some staff attached to departments 44 and 72 report incomplete archives, without knowing if the problem stems from a partial transfer or prior deletion.
IMAP client and local export: the only lasting protection against message loss
Waiting for a webmail to function to check messages means relying entirely on an infrastructure that one does not control. Setting up a local email client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail on macOS) using the IMAP protocol remains the most reliable method to keep a copy of exchanges.
IMAP settings for Nantes University staff
For university staff (to be distinguished from academy staff), the IMAP and SMTP servers remain active. The incoming server is imaps.univ-nantes.fr (port 993, SSL/TLS) and the outgoing server is smtp.univ-nantes.fr (port 465, SSL/TLS). Students use separate servers: imaps.etu.univ-nantes.fr and smtp.etu.univ-nantes.fr.
This infrastructure separation explains why an outage may affect students without impacting staff, and vice versa. Checking with colleagues in the same domain (@univ-nantes.fr or @etu.univ-nantes.fr) helps determine if the problem is general or localized.
Backing up locally with Thunderbird
Thunderbird allows copying the entire IMAP mailbox to local folders. The process involves selecting all messages in a folder and then dragging them to “Local Folders” in the sidebar. These copies remain accessible even if the remote server goes down.
Persistent connection errors: checks to make before contacting support
When the national platform or university webmail displays an error, the reflex to contact technical support wastes time if the problem originates from the user’s workstation. A few quick checks can eliminate the most common causes.
- Clear the browser’s cache and cookies. Old CAS session cookies from the academy can cause redirect loops on the new platform.
- Test with another browser. Some extensions (ad blockers, password managers) interfere with centralized authentication.
- Check that the password has not expired. The Nantes academy imposes periodic renewal, and an expired password does not always generate an explicit notification.
- Ensure that the workstation’s clock is synchronized. A discrepancy of a few minutes can cause SSL certificate authentication to fail.
If none of these checks resolve the issue, support can be reached via the DSI service desk for agents of Nantes University.
The closure of the old academic webmail caught some users off guard, and the transition to messagerie.education.gouv.fr is not without friction. Configuring a local IMAP client and regularly exporting folders remains, at this stage, the only way to no longer depend on a web interface to access professional messaging.