Mail

If you have any questions, please submit a ticket to CUIT at askcuit@columbia.edu or call CUIT Help Desk at (212) 854-1919.

More information regarding CUIT support is located here:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/support/index.html

Sending mail on CS Machines

There will be no support from CRF for sending mail on CS machines. Use it at your own risk. Please do not send ticket to CRF for problem related to this.

Determining Account Type

On any Cluster or CLIC machines, type "account".

Instructions for:

• Faculties, Adjuncts, Ph.D. students, Researchers, Staffs, CCLS
• Alumni
• M.S. students, Undergraduates
• Visitors
• Guests
• CVN

Other instructions:

• User Preparation for Mail Migration
• Mailing List
• How to archive your mail folder
• How to access your archived mail folder

Configure a Mail Program for CUIT:

• CubMail
• IMAP
• Pine

General Information from CUIT:

• Mail Filtering
• Mail Attachments
• Mail Backup
• Vacation
• Forwarding

Faculties, Adjuncts, Ph.D. Students, Researchers, Staffs, CCLS

We are moving the CS mail system to CUIT. The move should affect you very little. If you are using IMAP to read your email then the change is small. Instead of using the CS IMAP servers, you will use the CUIT IMAP servers. Your mailbox will be on the CUIT mail servers instead of your home directory.

• Supported mail reader: all IMAP mail readers such as Thunderbird, Outlook, webmail, imap-pine, etc. are supported by CUIT.
• NOT supported mail reader: all non-IMAP mail reader such as mail, Mail, mh, rmail, etc. are not supported by CUIT.

The current transition date for the CS MX record is scheduled for July 2nd, 2007. Your mailbox will be moved to CUIT much earlier than that date to ensure smooth migration for your mail:

• The quota for your mailbox is 3GB. If you want to move all of your mail folders to CUIT, please make sure that the total is less than 3GB. Please keep in mind that you also need room for new mail.
• Before moving your mail, we will ask you to put the mail folders (except your Inbox box) that will be moved to CUIT under the same directory. To avoid confusion, please don't put anything else in this directory. We will move your Inbox box and this directory to CUIT. Please take a little time to sort through your old mail to select what will be moved. We will send detailed instructions to you one week before your scheduled move date.
• Please make sure your group mailing list and mail aliases are created on mailman by June 1st.
• If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know ASAP and do not wait until the last minute before we move your mailbox to CUIT to bring up the problems. No question or concern is irrelevant. If it's important to you, then it's important to us. Any delay on this will affect your email migration.

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Alumni

After CS mail migration to CUIT, you will still have a CS account, but you will no longer be able to read mail on the CS machines or CUIT machines because your UNI is not active. However, CUIT will forward Columbia alumni email indefinitely. If you would like to keep your CS email address, you need to follow the procedure below:

1. Send an email to daisy@cs.columbia.edu, request to have your email forwarded to CUIT.
   
2. Go to: http://alumni.columbia.edu -> access
   To forward your email to the email address of your choice. If you do not know your UNI, just follow the instruction on this page to find your UNI.

You should do (1) and (2) right away.

After the above steps are done, if you can, please forward your cs email to your CUIT email address now and be done with the your mail migration.

We will submit your email address to CUIT to continue forwarding your CS email to CUIT email address after the migration date.

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M.S. students, Undergraduates

CS accounts for M.S. students and undergraduates will not include CS email address and a CS mailbox after this Spring term expiration date (06/30/07). Moving forward, NEW or RENEWAL M.S. students and undergraduate CS ACCOUNTS will not have a CS mailbox. The CUIT email address will be used as the student email address.

If you want to forward your @cs.columbia.edu email address to UNI@columbia.edu, please send your request to daisy@cs.columbia.edu with both addresses before May 15, 2007.

Email for current MS-GRA and faculty sponsored students accounts that are still active after 06/30/2007 will be moved to CUIT.

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Visitors

Visiting scholars with an office in the CS department and an active UNI, please follow the instruction for faculty.

Otherwise, please follow the instruction for Guest.

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Guests

Regardless of your CS account type, you have a guest account on the CS system if:

• You do not have a UNI
• You have a UNI but you are not a CS alumnus or a current staff, student or faculty of the CS or CCLS department

Guest accounts without a UNI will no longer have a cs.columbia.edu mailbox. CUIT will forward your email for up to 6 months if requested. Please start to forward your email now!

If you sponsor a guest account that absolutely need CS email, you need to prepare the paperwork for your guest to obtain a UNI as a visiting researcher or a consultant. You also need to provide me the name of your guest so we can arrange with CUIT to move mail over once a UNI is obtained.

Guest email can be forward to a new address up to 6 months (until the end of September, 2007).

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CVN

CVN students, please follow the instruction for M.S. students.

Please make sure you have a UNI to obtain a @columbia.edu email address. The change will only affect CS email addresses and not CS accounts. CS accounts will remain unchanged.

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User Preparation for Mail Migration

As part of the transfer of CS mail to CUIT, your mailbox must be migrated to CUIT's mail system. This conversion should affect you only minimally, but the following important steps MUST be taken for the transfer to go smoothly.

• Purge and organize your mail for the move.

You have between now and your scheduled move time to decide what mail you would like moved to CUIT. We will move your Inbox and any mail folders ~/mail. Folders which are not in ~/mail (except Inbox) WILL NOT BE MOVED to CUIT.

CUIT has given each CS user a quota of 3GB, so some users will need to significantly reduce the amount of email in their mailbox for the move. Following this scheduled mail migration, you will need to log in to CUIT servers to read mail.

• Remove CUIT -> CS forwards

If you are currently forwarding your CUIT mail to CS, we will STOP that forwarding the day before the conversion. DO NOT turn forwarding back on or your will create a mail loop once your email is migrated to CUIT.

• Reconfigure email clients

Following your scheduled migration, you will need to reconfigure your mail clients to use CUIT's servers. Instructions for configuring these clients are located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/software/email.html

Please contact daisy@cs.columbia.edu with questions or problems regarding the mail migration.

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Mailing List

The CS 'mailman' facility, for managing mailing lists, will be managed by CRF until further notice.

Users are responsible for moving their own mailing lists to mailman. Users in a mailing list should evaluate whether the list is still necessary and in use. If so, ONE person from EACH list must create the mailing list in mailman by going to the following URL:

https://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~crf/lists/index.html

Once the list is created, mailman will email the creator more instructions on administration of the list. That person will be the owner of the list from that point on.

If the members of mailing lists fail to transfer them to mailman, mail to these addresses WILL BOUNCE after the move to CUIT.

The mailing list address will now have @lists.cs.columbia.edu domain.
The mailing list address @cs.columbia.edu will no longer be valid after the migration.

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How to archive your mail folder

This is an instruction on how to archieve your mail folder into your CS home directory.

Please note that your CS home directory should be mounted on your Z drive on your local machine.

How to configure an IMAP mail client to archive your mail folder into your CS home directory:
(Z:\ drive is used as a locally mounted home directory and Thunderbird is the mail client in this example.)
1. Open a mail client. (e.g. Thunderbird)
2. Right click on Local Folders on the left pane.
3. Choose Properties
4. Click on Browse button on the right pane and locate the mail directory of your CS home directory which is mounted locally on your machine. (e.g. Z:\savemail)
5. Click OK to save changes.
6. Right click on Local Folders on the left pane.
7. Choose New Folder
8. Type in Name (e.g. 8-2007)
9. Drag and drop your mail into the Local Folders/New Folder for archive
10. Note that all the archieved mails will be included in the .snapshot and also backed up regularly on tape.

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How to access your archived mail folder

This is an instruction on how to read archieved mail folders that are stored under your CS home directory using a mail client. Your old mail will be saved in ~/oldcsmail.

For example, you should see something similar as the following:
crf@cluster:~$ ls -ld *old*
drwx------ 3 crf tech 4096 May 10 13:29 oldcsmail

Please note that your CS home directory should be mounted on your local machine.

How to configure a mail client to read your archived mail folder on your CS home directory:
(Z:\ drive is used as a locally mounted home directory and Thunderbird is the mail client in this example.)
1. Open a mail client. (e.g. Thunderbird)
2. Go to Tools -> Account Setting.
3. Choose Local Folders on the left pane.
4. Click on Browse button on the right pane and locate the mail directory of your CS home directory which is mounted locally on your machine. (e.g. Z:\mail)
5. Click OK to save changes.
6. Restart the client program and the mail folders should show up under Local Folders account that you just configured.

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CubMail

CUIT supports CubMail (http://cubmail.columbia.edu), a web-based email program, for accessing eamils. If you want to configure CubMail to have your CS email address in the sender field, follow the instruction below.

How to change the "From" field of CubMail:

1. Log in to CubMail.
2. Click on Options menu on the top.
3. Click on Personal Information.
4. Click on Edit your identities.
5. Choose default identity as Your Identities if you want your-CS-userid@cs.columbia.edu to be the only email address.
   Alternatively, click Create button to make a secondary identity. You can choose which identity to use when you are composing an email.
6. Type in your name and From: address. (e.g. your-CS-userid@cs.columbia.edu)
7. Click Change to save and exit.

Instructions for configuring these clients are located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/software/email.html

If you have any questions, please submit a ticket to CUIT at askcuit@columbia.edu or call CUIT Help Desk at (212) 854-1919.

More information regarding CUIT support is located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/support/index.html

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IMAP

CUIT supports any mail reader that uses IMAP. You can use Thunderbird, Outlook, Cubmail, or Pine, among others. If you prefer pine, you can use pine at pine.columbia.edu as well as on the CS machines.

Mail readers that are not IMAP-compatible, such as Mail, mail, MH, will not be supported by CUIT.

If you want to configure your IMAP client (e.g. Thunderbird, Outlook, or etc.) to have your CS email address in the sender field, follow the instruction below. (Thunderbird will be used as an example. If you are using Outlook, you can configure User Information of account properties.)

How to change the "From" field of Thunderbird:

1. Open Thunderbird.
2. Click on the account name on the left pane. (e.g. your-UNI@columbia.edu)
3. Click on Edit -> Properties... menu on the top.
4. Enter the desired email address (e.g. your-CS-userid@cs.columbia.edu) at Email Address: of Default Identity.
5. Click OK to save and exit.

Instructions for configuring these clients are located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/software/email.html

If you have any questions, please submit a ticket to CUIT at askcuit@columbia.edu or call CUIT Help Desk at (212) 854-1919.

More information regarding CUIT support is located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/support/index.html

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Pine

You can use pine on any CS servers. The sender field of your email will have your-CS-userid@cs.columbia.edu address.

Your pine configuration file (.pinerc) will be replaced with one configured to connect to Columbia mail servers.
Your existing .pinerc will be moved to .pinerc.old.date (e.g. .pinerc.old.04-25-07)

The process continue as follows:

• Start pine:    user@cluster $ pine
• You are prompted to supply your CU password, to log in to mail.columbia.edu.
• If you send email, you will be prompted for your password to connect to the smtp server send.columbia.edu.
• You will then be prompted for your CU uni and password. Pine will copy your message to the 'sent-mail' folder.

NOTE: The above login process only needs to be performed once for each pine session.
NOTE: Pine over IMAP is performing SSL encryption.
NOTE: You may get a certificate error on cluster machines during the last step. It is due to redirection
from mail.columbia.edu, moving you to another mail server.

You can use pine at pine.columbia.edu. The sender field of your email will have your-UNI@columbia.edu address. If you want to configure pine.columbia.edu to have your CS email address in the sender field, follow the instruction below.

How to change the "From" field in Pine:

1. Login to pine.columbia.edu. ($ssh your-UNI@pine.columbia.edu)
2. Start pine. ($pine)
3. From MAIN MENU of pine, select S Setup.
4. Select C Config.
5. Scroll down to highlight customized-hdrs.
6. Type '?' to read help. The first example shows how to change the From field.
7. Type 'E' to exit help.
8. With customized-hdrs highlighted, Press Enter to change the value.
   (e.g. type in "From: Your Full Name <your-CS-userid@cs.columbia.edu>")

Instructions for configuring these clients are located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/software/email.html

If you have any questions, please submit a ticket to CUIT at askcuit@columbia.edu or call CUIT Help Desk at (212) 854-1919.

More information regarding CUIT support is located here:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/support/index.html

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Mail Filtering

You can set your own mail filters and mail forwarding. The instructions are on the CUIT website:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/cyrus/ingo-guide.html

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Mail Attachments

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/filters.html

The CUIT URL above has a list of attachments that Microsoft recommended to filter. The only attachements which will be filtered are files with the above types or zip files containing files of the above types.

- All MS Office attachments will be accepted.
- Zip files that DO NOT contain the extensions above will be accepted.

For maximum email size, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/faq/232.html

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Mail Backup

Your CUIT mailbox will be backed up as follows:

- online backup: kept for 7 days
- tape backup: kept for 2 months

CUIT is working to provide self service for online backup. You will be notified by CUIT when the service is available.

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Vacation

For information on how to setup vacation for your email,
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/faq/220.html

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Forwarding

To forward your email, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/faq/239.html

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Webmaster
Revised: April 18, 2007