Email FAQ
Electronic Mail
at the Dept. of Computer Science
Frequently Asked Questions with Answers
Table of contents:
- Q:
- What is this thing about new IMAP-SSL mailservers?
- A:
- It's about replacing our POP and IMAP solution by
a IMAP-SSL solution.
The staff mailserver was replaced at July 16th 2002, the student mailserver
at April 9th 2003.
For some background, see
Our E-mail Architecture.
- Q:
- Can I do all the things with IMAP I used to do with POP?
- A:
- Yes. The strength of POP, other than its wide availability,
is that it minimizes
use of server resources and connect time when used via dialup. However,
since IMAP is a functional superset of POP, it can also be used in the "POP
paradigm" of connecting to a mail server, retrieving all the pending
messages, and disconnecting. Thus, the only advantage of the POP
*protocol* over IMAP relates to software availability and not
functionality. As the amount of IMAP software is growing rapidly, the
historic prevalence of POP is of diminishing importance when compared to
the many advantages of IMAP.
- Q:
- I'm at an external location, how will I know what to do?
- A:
- Our webpages about e-mail are now also visible to the
outside world:
E-Mail
Infrastructure.
As of April 19, 1999, our central e-mail servers support multiple
e-mail addresses per user. In addition to a user's regular e-mail
address <guest@cs.uu.nl> (or <guest@students.cs.uu.nl>),
users can now choose to add a
+cookie suffix to their e-mail address,
for example the user named guest could use
<guest+usenet@cs.uu.nl> (apparently for everything he posts on
Usenet News).
Delivery of incoming messages with recipient address
<guest+usenet@cs.uu.nl> will -in order- be tried to:
- the alias guest+usenet or
- the alias guest or
- the destinations listed in ~guest/.forward+usenet or
- the destinations listed in ~guest/.forward or
- the mailbox owned by guest or
- is sent back as undeliverable
In all succesful delivery cases, a
Delivered-To: <guest+usenet@cs.uu.nl>
header line is inserted by the local delivery agent.
Typical use of this address notation is subscription with different e-mail
addresses on different mailing-lists, so that you can simplify the automatic
filtering/selecting/archiving of messages being sent to you through these
mailing-lists (until now this had to be done with fuzzy and error-prone header
matching).
The procmail recipe
below automatically saves all incoming messages from the Linux-Lovers
mailing-list directed to guest+linuxlovers@cs.uu.nl in the file
~guest/Mail/Linux/lovers.mbox
#-----------------------------------
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
:0:
* ^Delivered-To: guest\+linuxlovers
Linux/lovers.mbox
#-----------------------------------
Another advantage: should you receive SPAM on one of these e-mail addresses,
you can probably figure out the source that leaked those addresses to the
spammers.
You can make use of the <user+cookie>
addresses immediately. There is no need to tell anyone in advance, not even
the local postmaster (but he'll notice it anyway). It is up to you to configure
your e-mail client to use these additional addresses in outgoing messages
properly and at the right time.
Questions or trouble reports should be directed at
<postmaster@cs.uu.nl> for
best response.
Netscape 4.x is showing pretty bad behaviour in relation with IMAP and
your saved mailbox-folders in your $HOME directory. I suggest that you
DO NOT USE netscape 4.x
Note: the suggested settings for Netscape are for the IMAP-SSL setup.
- Q:
- How should I configure Netscape 4.x?
- A:
- Have a look here.
- Q:
- How should I configure Netscape 6.x?
- A:
- Have a look here.
- Q:
- Why is Netscape 4 so slow? Why does it think that
everything in my home-directory is a mail-folder?
- A:
- I don't know. The latter must be a bug. If you run it for
the first time, Netscape asks you if you want to continue after it has
processed 30 `mail-folders': say "No" and type the actual name of the
directory containing your mail-folder in the pop-up box (usually: Mail)
For students, to configure netscape to use IMAP and SMTP goto
Preferences --> Mail & News --> Mail Server and:
- enter your username in the "Mail server user name" field
- in the "Outgoing mail (SMTP) server" field enter: your-smtp-server
- in the "Incoming mail server" field enter: your-imap-server
- select IMAP4
- Q:
- How should I configure Mozilla?
- A:
- Read our Using E-mail doc page.
- Q:
- How should I configure Pine?
- A:
- Read our Using E-mail doc
page.
- Q:
- How do I migrate from IMAP to IMAP-SSL?
- A:
- In your .pinerc file, change the inbox location
to:
inbox-path={imaps.cs.uu.nl/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX
- Q:
- Pine complains, telling me to use
inbox-path={imap.cs.uu.nl/notls}INBOX
- A:
- Pine is not right about that. This problem occurs when
the client machine reaches the maximum number of connections the imap
daemon the server
permits per IP number. As we increased this number, you shouldn't see
this error anymore.
- Q:
- Why do I have to logon with username/password to
access my e-mail?
- A:
- The e-mail environment is fully client-server based. Your
client accesses the mailbox through the IMAPv4 protocol on a centralized
high-performance server. Your username/password is used to verify your
identity.
- Q:
- Can I tell pine to shut up and just quit if I
tell it to quit?
- A:
- Sure. Many things in Pine can be personalized. The easiest
way is to use Pine's configuration screen: from the message index screen
type msc (Main Menu -> Setup -> Config) and
look for quit-without-confirm. Select this item and exit the
configuration (and save the configuation).
- Q:
- Can I get rid of the "Fcc:" composer header?
- A:
- Yes, you can: from the message index screen type msc
and change:
default-fcc = ""
fcc-name-rule = default-fcc
saved-msg-name-rule = default-folder
- Q:
- If I save messages, Pine saves "by-recipient" which is
always me. How useful can this be?
- A:
- That was an oversight, which actually works well if you're
receiving mail from a lot of mailing-list. A more common setting would
be to save it by sender's name. Go into configuration mode (type msc)
and change:
saved-msg-name-rule = by-from
- Q:
- Can I switch off Pine's annoying "New Mail" beeps?
- A:
- Yes, go into configuration mode and set:
[X] quell-status-message-beeping
- Q:
- How do I use Sun Solaris' CDE DtMail ?
- A:
- You don't. The CDE DtMail mailtool doesn't support
IMAP-SSL.
- Q:
- How do I use Mutt ?
- A:
- Read our Using E-mail doc page.
- Q:
- How do I use Eudora?
- A:
- Please don't. If you insist,
read our Using E-mail doc page.
- Q:
- When I start up
Eudora ,
sometimes I get the message that another
Eudora session is already in progress?
- A:
-
If you are certain this is not the case and Eudora keeps complaining,
terminate your Eudora session, and remove the file
H:\Mail\OWNER.LOK.
- Q:
- I frequently get a message saying "could not open
file C:\docume~1\user\locals~1\temp\xxx.tmp for reading. No such file or directory exists"
- A:
-
The problem is that there are messages in the "out" mailbox which have not been sent.
These messages have "attachments" that are linked to the C:\docume~1\user\locals~1\temp
directory but are actually no longer there
(C:\docume~1\user\locals~1\temp is cleaned as soon as you log off)
The best thing to do is to open up the "out" mailbox and look for entries with a status
of "Q" or the blue dot. Open them up and see if there is an entry on the attachments
line that points to C:\docume~1\user\locals~1\temp\xxx.
If so, either remove the attachment entry or delete the message.
- Q:
- Are Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express supported?
- A:
- Maybe,
read our Using E-mail doc page.
- Q:
- Is there a webmail facility?
- A:
- Yes, there is. We installed SquirrelMail.
See our Using E-mail doc page.
- Q:
- .forward files seem to be unsupported?
- A:
- Of course they are supported! There have been failure reports
with access-permissions over NFS file-systems in the past, but nowadays the
.forward files are processed with the rights of the receiving user on
whose behalf the delivery is made, so that is all fixed.
- Q:
- How do I automatically forward my mail to a different e-mail address ?
- A:
- This is what the .forward is generally used for. The .forward
file may contain one or more e-mail addresses, either seperated by comma's or by new-lines.
If you want to leave a local copy of the message too, use something like this:
your-login-name
metoo@some.where.else
This will cause the message to be delivered to the mailbox of user your-login-name
and forwarded to the address <metoo@some.where.else> as well.
- Q:
- How do I use procmail ?
- A:
- procmail is generally started from a $HOME/.forward file with
a line very similar to this one:
"|/local/bin/procmail -f-"
See also the the procmail
documentation.
The `|' (pipe) command in `procmail' is NOT available to students!
- Q:
- How do I use filter ?
- A:
- filter is obsolete, buggy and might even loose your
mail, so it's not available anymore on our new IMAP-SSL server.
Use maildrop or procmail instead.
- Q:
- I'm going on vacation and I want to let people know
that I'm out.
- A:
- So, you're going on vacation... remember to send us
a postcard!
Seriously, in the past you had to use the vacation program to auto-reply to the
sender of a message.
Nowadays you have to use our own vacation method, which doesn't respond to
tagged SPAM.
See the:
Using
Mail page.
WARNING: nowadays it's not only your
beer buddies that have access to the Internet - burglars have too. If you
have your personal home address listed on your WWW page and maybe even have
pictures of your house and family, it might be stupid to hand out detailed
information about your vacation dates...
Loss of connectivity hurts us all. Spam hurts us all even more.
- Q:
- What is `SPAM' ?
- A:
- SPAM is net-speak for the problem known as
receiving (lots of) unrequested e-mail advertisements or other commercial matters. There lot's of interesting
documentation on SPAM (or UCE) on www.cauce.org.
We strongly advise you to read the detailed information about the
anti-spam policy at our department.
- Q:
- I received SPAM: how can I help stopping it in the future?
- A:
- If you received a SPAM message, it is likely that the message
has been tossed by the central mail-server and given the benefit of the doubt. If, by
your opinion, it is SPAM, send the SPAM message including all headers
with comment to <abuse@cs.uu.nl>.
- Q:
- Why doesn't xbiff notify me of the arrival of
new messages?
- A:
- xbiff and alikes assume that your incoming mailbox
can be accessed throught the UNIX filesystem. This is simply no longer true.
- Q:
- Can I still be informed about the arrival of new mail?
- A:
- That depends. Pine will inform you about the arrival
of new mail if you keep it running - even if you iconify its window. If you
happen to use Netscape select
Options -> Mail and News Preferences ->
Organization -> Remember Mail Password
Now minimize/iconify your Netscape Mail-window and the icon will change
shape upon arrival of new e-mail messages.
- Q:
- Should I be checking for new mail every 5 seconds?
- A:
- NO! NO! NO! Every 5 minutes is a reasonable value.
- Q:
- I'm a mailing-list maintainer, but the mailing-lists
seem to have disappeared?!
- A:
- You're right: they were moved.
We now use Mailman, a mailinglisttool with a webinterface. You can
find the list of lists here: here. NB: Several lists
are kept 'hidden' by their listadmins.
- Q:
- There seem to be some old-style lists?
- A:
- Yes, these are the 'staffgrouplists', they are generated
from our (person)database. Additions to these lists go into files
in /users/local/department/lib/mail-lists/ on all
Sun systems. If you don't have a Sun system in front of you, you'll have
to login to the Solaris platform server
(see announcement of October 11, 1998)
Changes to these mailing-lists in this directory are NOT immediate. The
mail-server checks for changes here from time to time (actually: every hour
on the hour between 7am and 10pm daily) and updates its own copy of the
mailing-lists.
- Q:
- Who do I ask if I want a new mailing-list to be created?
- A:
- Send e-mail to:
<helpdesk@cs.uu.nl>
- Q:
- Are there any resource limits enforced on e-mail ?
- A:
- Yes! The resource limits visible to users are listed
in the table below.
| Limit
| STAFF network
| STUDENTS network
|
| Maximum size of an individual e-mail message
| 20 MB
| 10 MB
|
- Q:
- What is the status of the ``staff'' mailing-list ?
- A:
-
The ``staff'' mailing-list may be used to get an important message into
the mailbox of every department's staff member.
Be reserved in sending a message to the whole staff. It is
appropriate only:
- if the message is important enough that it would otherwise justify
sending a written letter to every staff member;
- if the message content requires a response from the staff members
(e.g. subscription to the `Kerstlunch').
Please note that sending a message to the staff mailing-list is restricted
to internal use only! If you're outside the department, you'll get an
automatic message rejected response.
henkvl@cs.uu.nl,
Thu Jul 13 10:22:43 MET 2006