Electronic Mail
accessing mail
Starting in the Fall of 2007, your CS email will get forwarded by default to your ITS account, so you should be able to read your CS email using Swatmail. If you don't have an ITS account, or want to send email from the CS machines, keep reading.
There are several programs that you may use to handle mail on the CS machines. Here is a list with some links for more info about each program:
- pine - good for new users -an extremely user friendly program
Our page on pine
The home of pine...http://www.washington.edu/pine/ - mutt - a small but very powerful text-based email client
$ man mutt
Our page on muttThe home of mutt...http://www.mutt.org/
My First Mutt...an overview for new users - thunderbird - a gui-based email client
Our page on configuring thunderbird
Thunderbird's main page - mail - a standard unix program
$ man mail
$ man mailx
A fast way to send a file with mail is:
$ mail username < filename - procmail - a program to automatically process and filter your mail
$ man procmail
Our page on procmail
read the FILTERING MAIL FAQ - spamassasin - a spam detecting program, which in combination with
procmail can filter spam to a junk mailbox.
Look at our spam filtering page to see how to set it up.
Please ask the sysadmins if you need help with or want more information on these programs.
forwarding mail
If you want your CS mail forwarded to another address (like your swat address), it's easy.
- Make a file named ".forward" in your home directory
$ emacs .forward (one way to do this)
- In the body of the file, write the address to which you want your mail
forwarded.
lastname1@swarthmore.edu
- Save the file.
- To stop forwarding your mail, just delete the file.
$ rm .forward
addressing mail
- You should remember that:
- username@cs.swarthmore.edu is a CS address
- username@swarthmore.edu is a Swarthmore address
- username@sccs.swarthmore.edu is an SCCS address
Someone's username at the Swarthmore or SCCS networks is probably not the same as their username on the CS network. Also, while every Swat student, staff, and faculty member has a Swarthmore e-mail address, usually only CS students, faculty, and staff have CS e-mail addresses, and whoever wants one can get an SCCS address.
- To find the username of someone, you can use the command "list-users".
$ list-users -(name or part of name) such as
$ list-users -jon
which gives you all users with "jon" in their user and/or last name.
To find out how to use list-users, type
$ list-users -h
- To send mail to another user on the CS network, you only have to type their username. The program will fill in "@cs.swarthmore.edu".
So you can type:To: local-staff
and leave it at that!
Warning: This does not work for SCCS and Swarthmore addresses! If you type an SCCS or Swarthmore username without the @blah.blah.edu, it will add @cs.swarthmore.edu to the end, try to find the address, and send you a message saying it can't find the user's mailbox.