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The following provides information for basic configuration of email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook.
<username>@cselabs.umn.edu
| Host: | mail.cselabs.umn.edu |
|---|---|
| Incoming Mail Server: | IMAP |
| Secure connection (SSL): | This server requires SSL to receive incoming mail. |
| Authentication type: | Password |
This server only works from CSE Labs networks. For off-campus please use your ISP's SMTP server or visit the University's E-mail Configuration Guides to learn how to configure your email client to connect to the university's SMTP server with your x.500 account.
| Host: | mail.cselabs.umn.edu |
|---|---|
| Server Type: | SMTP |
| Secure connection (SSL): | This server does not require SSL to send mail. |
We recommend that you use the IMAP protocol when configuring your e-mail client. IMAP is ideal for people who need to access e-mail from multiple computers since IMAP stores your e-mail on the mail server. POP downloads e-mail to your local computer and removes it from the mail server. Only use POP if you plan to access your mail from one computer. Regardless of the protocol you choose, you must use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to connect to the CSE Labs mail servers.
Also, if the mail is left on the server, it is backed up nightly and safe from potential disasters, such as disk errors.
Do not access your mail from IMAP and a 'local' mail client (such as pine, mutt, or elm) at the same time. Either use IMAP clients at once or a local client on a single machine. Do not use POP and IMAP at the same time, choose one or the other. If you don't do this odd things my happen to your mailspool and there may be e-mail loss.
For more information regarding IMAP and POP, see the following links:
Some users prefer to keep many messages in their mailspool (/var/spool/mail/$username, also called INBOX in IMAP) for easy access. The problem with this is that it leaves large files in /var/spool/mail. Since that directory has to be a single partition and can't easily be backed up if we expand it further, it is a better solution to allow the mail user agent to copy the mail automatically into a user’s home directory. Directions are below for popular clients.
Be aware, ~/mbox is subject to your quota. While the clients will not delete the mail in /var/spool/mail if they encounter an error, it may take some intervention to uncorrupt a ~/mbox if it ends up in a truncated state. Feel free to contact the Operator if needed.
Also, as with /var/spool/mail mailboxes, the ~/mbox files have the same locking conditions as /var/spool/mail. Take care to only use a single client as a time to access mail, as this will reduce locking conflicts and related issues.
First off, we highly recommend POP users to convert to IMAP.
To automatically move mail to your home directory with c-client based clients, do the following:
touch ~/mbox
chmod 600 ~/mbox
c-client will then automatically copy mail from /var/spool/mail into your home directory when you exit Pine, or use IMAP or POP.
Default Mutt settings should already be moving mail into ~/mbox. However, with the following settings it will be done automatically without prompting each session:
set mbox="~/mbox"
set move=yes
Elm’s default settings should ask upon exiting elm to move all read mail to ~/mbox.
(back to top)In order to prevent your machine from becoming infected, always run a virus scanner. If you receive a suspicious email, check a virus scanner's site, such as Symantec (makers of Norton AV) and see if the email you have received is listed.
For more information, please visit the Safe Computing page.