X Windows

There are a number of ways to check your email. If you are logged in to one of the department's computers, then the two typical choices are kmail and evolution, which both provide nice graphical interfaces similar to those of windows email clients. Also available is the Mozilla email client thunderbird.

ssh

If you are logging in via ssh, then you will likely want to use either mutt or pine. In theory, pine is no longer supported here and mutt is more likely to actually work; but in practice neither works without some configuration. In particular, depending on which one you want to use, you should have one the following files in your home directory. (Or at least, something that looks like it in the important places.) You should be able to save either of these files to your home directory and rename theme to ".pinerc" or ".muttrc" (i.e., run mv pinerc.sample .pinerc at the command line), and then and use the corresponding application without trouble. The usage for both applications is pretty straightforward, and they both have a fair amount of help documentation browsable from within the program.

webmail

If you have access to a web browser, you can check your email via our webmail server. Of course, this only gives you access to those emails which are still in your inbox.

server names

If you want to use your own email client at home, the names of the servers are as follows: I strongly advise that if you do this, you have either your home computer or your work computer leave the messages on the server, rather than removing them, when checking email. Otherwise, you'll be splitting your email into two different collections (one on your computer at home, one at school), based on when you check them. Since here we actually backup data, it's not a bad idea to have your home computer leave it on the server.

quotas

To save space you are only allocated a few megabytes on the mail server. There is a soft limit and a hard limit. If you hit the soft limit, you will get a few warning emails before the server creates a BIGMAIL file containing all of your emails and copies it into your home directory, removing all your emails from the server. If you hit the hard limit, this may happen immediately with no warning --- you'll log in to the server, and your emails will not be there. To avoid this, you should either set the email client you use to remove the emails from the server as it checks them, or make a habit of saving emails into local folders and deleting spam as you get it.

procmail and forwarding

It is recommended that you use procmail to forward your emails. At some point, I'll put info here about how to have procmail automagically delete emails labeled [SPAM]. (The filter is set pretty high, so you shouldn't lose any non-spam.)