Email in ISRL

Where can I read my email?

You can read your email on any machine that has a secure IMAP client (IMAPS). You will have to use the ISRL IMAP server (see below).

What is IMAPS? Why don't you just use IMAP?

IMAPS is a secure version of the IMAP server. This stops passwords from being exchanged in cleartext on the network. As part of the security measures in place in ISRL (as well as other parts of the University such as EWS and the Computer Science Department) ISRL has eliminated all cleartext passwords.

Where is the IMAP/IMAPS server?

The address of the server is imap.isrl.uiuc.edu

We use a secure server. The certificate may be found here

Why can't I create any top-level folders, only subfolders of INBOX?

The answer for this is in the Courier-IMAP FAQ

What are the magic lines to put in my configuration file for reading mail using mutt?

Note that you will have to replace "username" in the lines below with your username on the ISRL systems.

# This sets the location where mutt will look for and save certificates
# Modify this for your own setup.  I have something like this 
#
#  set certificate_file=/home/pakenned/.mutt/Certificates
#
set certificate_file=/home/username/somePath/CertificateFileForMutt

# This sets the spoolfile (i.e., where mutt will look by default for
# incoming mail).
set spoolfile={username@imap.isrl.uiuc.edu/ssl}INBOX.

# These are where your mail files are
set folder={username@imap.isrl.uiuc.edu/ssl}INBOX/

What are the magic lines to put in my configuation file for for reading mail using pine?

 
inbox-path={imap.isrl.uiuc.edu/SSL/NoValidate-Cert}inbox

According to Martin, this works on Pine under Unix and from PC-Pine under Windows. The string "/SSL" indicates that one should use SSL for the connection, and the string "/NoValidate-Cert" option is used because we use our own self-signed certificate for SSL.

What are the magic lines to put in my configuration file for reading mail using Gnu Emacs?

According to Dave Dubin, the adding the following lines to your .gnus file will work with Linux machines in the ISRL running gnus from within Emacs:

(setq imap-ssl-program "/usr/local/bin/openssl s_client -ssl3 -connect %s:%p")
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
        '((nnml "")
          (nnimap "ISRL"
                (nnimap-address "128.174.155.151")
                (nnimap-stream ssl)
                (nnimap-list-pattern ("INBOX*"))
                )))

; Some other lines you may wish to add:

; Copy mail (and news) I write to the Sent folder
(setq gnus-message-archive-group "INBOX.Sent")
(setq gnus-message-archive-method 
     '(nnimap "ISRL"))

; Add this reply-to header to all my outgoing mail
(setq message-default-headers "Reply-To: joeblow@uiuc.edu")

For more documentation see the Gnus manual at http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_toc.html

Is it possible to automatically route mail into subfolders?

If you read email using Emacs and gnus, you can split messages into subfolders by matching on Emacs regular expressions. Add lines like the following to your .gnus file:

; Split the messages in my INBOX.
(setq nnimap-split-inbox
          '("INBOX"))

; Use only the first matching rule, not every one.
(setq nnimap-split-crosspost nil)

; Splitting rules run only against the headers.
; Each rule has a destination, and a regular expression
(setq nnimap-split-rule
      '(("INBOX.OEBPS" "^Subject:.*OEBPS")
        ("INBOX.Class-l" "^Sender:.*CLASS-L")
        ("INBOX.spam" "^X-Mailer:.*The Bat")
        ("INBOX.spam" "^Content-type:.*text/html")
        ("INBOX.New" ""))) ; i.e., everything else

For more information on splitting, consult section 6.5 of the Gnus manual http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_toc.html
For details of Emacs's regexp flavor, see either the Emacs manual: http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs-21.2/html_chapter/emacs_14.html#SEC97
or Friedl's book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/

How do I get information about using Eudora?

Eudora has a website http://www.eudora.com that has a wealth of information. Of particular note is their download page on which they have links for the user manual for the various platforms they support. You will need to use the "Required, Alternate Port" option. While Eudora calls this the "older style" it's really the more secure style and works just fine.

Where do I get PC-Pine under Windows?

It is available (along with the other versions of pine) at http://www.washington.edu/pine

What about sending mail?

Use the SMTP server--mail.isrl.uiuc.edu. Since we do not do authentication for SMTP (that is, no passwords are involved), we do not use SSL to send mail.

Is there a webmail interface?

There is a (presently working, but unsupported) program called squirrelmail. It is available for testing at https://www-s.isrl.uiuc.edu/webmail.

isrl-support@isrl.uiuc.edu