CISE :: Help : Mail

CISE Help & Resources

CISE Mail Information

The CISE email setup is based on IMAP. Limited support for POP is also available for historical purposes. For more technical information on these two setups, go here.

How do I Read CISE Email

The following are the typical configurations required by IMAP clients, with the exception of CISE-installed webmail clients:

Server       : imap.cise.ufl.edu
SSL Required : Yes
Port	     : 993 (imap over SSL port)

Other common tips for reading mail through IMAP:

If your client support scanning all folders for new mail be sure you *don't* have this turned on unless you presort your mail into folders using procmail or another filtering program
While Courier IMAP is a fast server, it's advisable to keep the number of messages in your INBOX under 1000 to help mail checking perform better
If possible, use a client that uses folder caches (many do, pine and squirrelmail do not, however, pine is still very fast in conjunction with Courier)

See the notes below on recommended clients below for more information per client.

Here's a short list of the IMAP clients CISE recommends for reading mail. Before selecting a client, please read the notes regarding the particular client.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird is an open-source, cross-platform mail client, renowned for its message filtering capabilities. It is installed on most CISE machines, and is available for free download from the Mozilla Thunderbird homepage.

Sylpheed

Sylpheed is a GTK based mail client that can support MH-style folders, POP mail, and IMAP mail. It is highly configurable, and very fast, especially when used with the Courier IMAP server. This is our recommended client for Unix systems.

Please refer to the Sylpheed configuration page for more information.

Pine

Pine is a well known text-based mail client. Pine was supported under the old CISE POP mail scheme, and is supported for IMAP. The differences are listed below.

Pine will use IMAP instead of POP, and so the user will be required to enter a username and password when pine is first run.
Pine must be compiled with ssl support to connect to CISE's IMAP server.

Users should set the following variables in their .pinerc for IMAP support:

inbox-path={imap.cise.ufl.edu/ssl}
folder-collections={imap.cise.ufl.edu/ssl}INBOX.[]

Folders that contain subfolders will show up in pine with a trailing [.] . You can enter the folder itself by typing <Return> after selecting the folder, and you can see it's subfolders by typing ">".

Other Clients

There are other clients users may try as well:

Outlook/Outlook Express
Ximian Evolution
Other clients at: www.imap.org

In general, we recommend avoiding Outlook and Outlook Express due to their propensity to propagate viruses.

How do I read CISE email on the web?

SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is a web-based email system that uses the IMAP protocol to read mail. It is the only webmail client hosted locally be a CISE server. To run Squirrelmail, go to the URL: https://webmail.cise.ufl.edu/squirrelmail

Squirrelmail is going to be slower than most of the other clients, as it requires the browser to talk to the web server, and the web server to talk to the IMAP server. CISE recommends using squirrelmail only when other clients aren't readily available, such as when traveling, especially if the user has a large INBOX.

Gmail

Gmail is a free e-mail service provided by Google, with a web-based mail client, whose quick, robust, and intuitive interface makes it a popular choice among webmail users.

For more information on acquiring a free Gmail account, or setting up Gmail to work with your existing CISE email account, see the Gmail Help Page.

How do I send mail through mail.cise.ufl.edu?

There are two ways to configure your email client to send email through our SMTP host "mail.cise.ufl.edu".

Use a client that supports SMTP Authentication and send through CISE
Use the SMTP host of the ISP you are using to send your outgoing mail

Using a Client that supports SMTP Authentication

CISE allows the use of SMTP Authentication for mobile CISE users. You will need a client that supports SSL as well as SMTP Authentication.

To enable SMTP Authentication, edit the preferences for your mail client and select

Use STARTTLS (negotiated SSL) for outgoing mail (SMTP, port 25)
Use SMTP Authentication

If your mail client does not support STARTTLS, but does support SSL (e.g., Outlook), set the following:

Use SSL for outgoing mail (SMTP, port 465)
Use SMTP Authentication

Typically, you will be prompted for your CISE username and password once per session when you first send mail, and not again until you restart your mail client. Some clients may allow you to use the same settings for both incoming and outgoing mail.

Use the SMTP host of the ISP you are using to send your outgoing mail

The second solution is to use the SMTP host of the ISP that you are using to send your outgoing email.

The workaround for this would be to edit one's mail preferences, (under Netscape this can typically be done by going to Edit-Preferences-Mail&Groups-Mail Server-SMTP) and set the SMTP (outgoing) mail server to one of the following:

the SMTP host of the ISP that you are using,
the mail handler for the machine or domain to which you are trying to send mail and specify that handler as the "Mail Server"

If you opt for the second option, you can find out the server for the address you are sending to, run the following command:

nslookup -type=mx (host or domain in question)

This should give you a list of mail exchangers, any of which could be temporarily used as the "mail server" for Netscape.

Problems sending

There are two types of problems related to sending mail. Local issues typically result in an error popping up immediately. Remote issues occur when it appears that the message is sent correctly, but a short time later, you get a bounce message.

Some of the local errors you might get when sending email include:

Relaying Denied: CISE does not relay email as an anti-SPAM measure. For more information on this error, as well as information on how to propertly send email, refer to the secion How do I send mail through CISE above.

Almost without exception, if you get a bounce message, the problem is either with you user you are sending email to, or the system their account is on. In either case, there is nothing that can be done locally to fix the problem. If you want to try to resolve the issue, read the bounce message carefully. Typical error messages that are due to the user include:

User's mailbox is full or user is over quota: The user you sent to has exceeded his quota. Almost all sites impose quotas on the amount of disk space a user is allowed to use. The user has exceeded that limit, and until they clean up, they cannot receive new email.
Invalid address or no such user: You have probably mistyped the email address. Check it carefully. If it is definitely a known email address, try resending the message. If it still fails, most likely the user's account has been removed for some reason.

Please do not report these types of errors to system administrators (either local or remote). These types of errors should be reported to the user you were sending email to (either by phone or an alternate email address).

Errors that are due to the remote system include error messages similar to:

Content denied: Most sites do some kind of SPAM/Virus filtering, and this message often means that your message was caught by the filters. If you are using HTML email, this might be the cause. Most email clients allow you to send HTML or plain text. HTML mail is sometimes treated as SPAM. If you sent an attachment, this could be the cause of the problem. Many sites won't deliver messages with any type of runnable attachement (an executable, visual basic script, etc.). The best solution to this is to send the email in an alternate form (plain text with no attachments).
Message too large: If you have a large attachment, some sites will block it. In general, no email should be sent with a large attachment. Instead, put the attachment on your web site and send an email with the URL to the file.

If you get a bounce that indicates a problem with the remote system, you can report it to postmaster at the remote domain. i.e. if you sent email to foo@bar.baz.com that bounced, typically the proper place to report problems would be postmaster@bar.baz.com, but only do this if you are certain that the bounce indicates a problem and NOT simply a remote policy (for example, reporting that an email you sent with a executable attached bounced is not useful... their policy is to block that type of email, and notifying them that it bounced isn't going to change anything).

Problems receiving email

There are several circumstances which may cause this problem. Please check the following causes, and if you are unable to resolve the issue, contact a consultant or system administrator immediately.

Over Quota

Probably the most common cause of not being able to receive email is that you are over your mail quota, or that an email you have received would cause you to go over quota.

To check this, log on to a unix machine and type:

mailquota -v

The output will look something like the following:

MAIL quotas for user jfhmtest (uid 7048):
   Usage           Quota           Limit
   22884           23040           24320

The usage column shows the amount of space you are using (in KB). The quota and limit columns show the upper limit of what you can use. In the above example, the person is using 22 MB of an allowed 23 MB. For short-term usage, the person can go as high as 24 MB, but they must drop back below 23 MB in order to get under quota.

If you are very close to your quota, or over your quota, this is likely the reason you cannot read email. The best solution is to keep your usage at 90% of your quota or less.

If you are trying to delete mail using your mail client, and get an error like the following:

"ERROR : Could not complete request.
Query: COPY 1017 "INBOX.Trash"
Reason Given: [ALERT] COPY failed -
  no write permission or out of disk space."

You are over your quota, and will need to remove some old mail. First, try emptying your Trash. If that fails to resolve the problem, try the following steps.

You will need to log onto a Unix system and remove mail by hand. To do this, log in to any unix machine and type:

cd ~/Maildir
du -k | sort -n

You'll see a list of directories whose usage is sorted by size:

972    ./.cise.admin/cur
976    ./.cise.admin
1813   ./.apps.ruby-talk/cur
1898   ./.apps.ruby-talk
5012   ./cur

In this instance, the cur directory (your actual INBOX) has the highest usage. To check the size of various messages in this folder, type:

cd DIR
ls -l | sort +4n

In this example, replace DIR with cur since that is the directory we want to check. Replace DIR with whatever directory you wish to check.

After typing the above, you'll see a list of files sorted by size (the first couple columns are ignored here since they are not important).

... Size    Date         Filename
... (bytes)
... 1422903 Jan 10 1105394059.570_0:2,S
... 1743207 Feb  2 1107356972.933_0:2,S
... 2641497 Dec  2 1102011835.237_0:2,S
... 2695464 Jan  6 1105065300.619_0:2,S
... 3545458 Feb 24 1109273039.327_0:2,RS

Check to make sure you want to delete the largest files. To look at a file, type:

more 1109273039.327_0:2,RS

If it's not important, remove it with the command:

rm 1109273039.327_0:2,RS

Repeat the above procedure for any of the other folders with high usage.

Once you're back under quota, normal mail deletes should work again.

Forwarding Email

Mail forwarding is handled using a mail forward file. The forward file is:

$HOME/.forward

for each CISE user.

The format of the mail forward file is covered in the aliases manual page.

Typically, the mail forward file should contain only the single line:

USERNAME@cise.ufl.edu

The most common problem encountered when forwarding email is that the permissions on the forward file get corrupted.

Make sure that file exists, and is world readable, but NOT world writable.

Examples

To forward your email to another account, simply put the address to which you want your mail forwarded into your forwarding file (determined above). For example, if you wanted to forward your mail to

user@foo.bar.com

edit the forwarding file and put that address on a line by itself. If there is already an address of the form USER@mail.cise.ufl.edu or USER@cise.ufl.edu in the forwarding file, just replace that with the address to which you wish to forward your mail.

To forward your email to another account while leaving a copy on your CISE account, replace the current line of one of the forms:

USER@mail.cise.ufl.edu

with a line of one of the following forms:

user@foo.bar.com, USER@mail.cise.ufl.edu

Receiving a large file

If you need someone to send you a file that is too large to send as an email attachment, we provide an alternate method using the web. Click here for more information.

Vacation auto-reply

Use the Unix vacation program to create an auto-reply which replies to incoming messages. The vacation program will only send an auto-reply to each person who sends you mail only once, so it's best to include your return date. Also, vacation will not send auto-replies to mailing lists (it only replies to messages that have your address in the To: field)

Edit the file ~/.vacation.msg and add something like this:

Subject: I am on vacation

I am on vacation until July 22.
Your mail regarding "$SUBJECT" will
be read when I return.

If you have something urgent, please
contact Joe Jones (jones@fB0).
	--John

Run
```
vacation -I
```
at the Unix command line.
Put the following in your .forward:
```
\USERNAME, "|/usr/bin/vacation USERNAME"
```
where USERNAME is your username.
Send yourself a test message to make sure it's working properly.

Personal email lists

Full-blown mailing lists require that the system staff set them up. This is done for departmental purposed (class mailing lists, departmental groups, etc.), but is not done for personal mailing lists.

There is a facility available for users to create simple mailing lists which they can manage. Please read the maillists man page for details. It can also be used to create automatic replies to some types of requests for information.

Presorting messages into folders

It is possible to presort incoming messages into separate folders. For details, please about Mail Delivery and Procmail.

Reading gatorlink email

All UF students can have a Gatorlink account. If you don't have an account and are eligible for one, get one. See help.gatorlink.ufl.edu for more information.

Reading your Gatorlink email

You can read your gatorlink email in your normal email client, or on the web. To read it on the web, go to the Gatorlink webmail site here.

To configure your email client to read gatorlink email, you can follow a similar procedure as the one used to configure your client to read CISE email. More detailed instructions are available at the Gatorlink Help Site. To read IMAP, select the server imap.ufl.edu, and the type is IMAP. Other options can be set as desired. Be sure to use your Gatorlink username and NOT your CISE username.

Your outgoing (SMTP) server should be either smtp.ufl.edu (if you are on a campus network) or the outgoing mail server of your ISP.

Anti-SPAM/Anti-Virus measures

SPAM and Virus scanning are done on all incoming mail messages. Details can be found here.

Email Etiquette

The following suggestions will make sending email nicer, both for you and the people you send email to.

Send pure text. Many email clients allow you to send email as text, HTML, or MIME. However, not all email clients handle all equally well however, and just because it looks right in your client does not mean that it will look right in all clients. Unless there is a real reason to go with formatted email, stick with plain text. It works in all clients. MIME should be used for sending messages with attachments. HTML should only be used when it is essential to add formatting to the message (and in this case, perhaps it would be better to format it in a word processor and send the word processor document as an attachment).
Limit the use of attachments. Most sites impose limits on how much disk space a user can use. When you send a large attachment, it fills up that space, and may cause the user problems (they may lose other email that couldn't be delivered for example). To send a large file, put it on your web page (i.e. copy it to your public_html directory) and send a message containing a URL instead of an attachement. Then the user can download the file at thier conveniance without interfering with the operation of their mail server or filling up their spool.