CSLab Email Configuration

There are two primary ways of accessing your email at CSLab. You can either configure and use a client-side mail reader, such as Outlook, Eudora or Alpine, or you can read and send mail via our webmail server (please see the section below on Webmail). Please note that if you use a client-side mail reader then pay special attention to the section titled "Email Settings: IMAP" and "Email Settings: SMTP" below.

Important:
Never try to use more than one program to access your mail simultaneously. For example, if you have an instance of Alpine running, do not try to open your mail with Outlook, Eudora, webmail, etc., until you have exited Alpine, or else chaos will ensue.

All mail messages delivered to you in the past two weeks are copied to a shadow, read-only mailbox in /var/oldmail/<your_login_name>. If you accidentally delete a needed message, or destroy your mailbox, you can recover the lost messages from this file.

E.g. If you use the "Mutt" program:

mutt -f /var/oldmail/$USER

Email Settings: IMAP

To use CSLab's IMAP server you must configure your mail client to use SSL or TLS. This prevents your access credentials from being sent in the clear. Instructions for common clients are here.

For all clients use the following setting:

IMAP server: imap.cs.toronto.edu

Email Settings: SMTP

In order to send email using the CSLab SMTP server, please configure your mail client as follows:

SMTP server: mail.cs.toronto.edu

You should, if possible, configure your mail client to use TLS or STARTTLS for outgoing (SMTP) email security/authentication. This uses encryption to protect an outgoing mail message while it is being transferred from your mail client to our mail server.

Be advised that you can only use mail.cs.toronto.edu to send email if you are on the University network. If you are off-campus, say at home, our mail server will refuse to relay email on your behalf since it is only configured to process email from machines with University IP addresses.

If you wish to use the CSLab mail server remotely (i.e. off-campus), please first connect using VPN or SSH-tunneling. VPN is recommended.

Webmail

You may access webmail with the following URL https://webmail.cs.toronto.edu.

Our new webmail also supports mobile devices which means that if you go to webmail with your cellphone, tablet or e-reader, you will get a version that is better optimized for your device.

Please be aware that our webmail application expects to find IMAP folders (i.e. mailboxes) in one of three places: the top level of your home directory, a subdirectory of your home directory named 'mail' or a subdirectory of your home directory named 'Mail'. That is, for an example person 'testuser':

• ~testuser/
• ~testuser/mail/
• ~testuser/Mail/

If you store your IMAP folders in an alternate location, please get in touch with your Point of Contact (PoC) for help with working around this limitation. It should be simple to address, but as always with mail, caution is the best practice.

Basic Email Use

Email Delivery

Mail to you is normally delivered to your inbox, where it can be read through IMAP (see above), through webmail, or with a number of mail programs on the application servers such as alpine or mutt. On CSLab's application servers, your inbox is also accessible as

/var/mail/your_login_name

In addition, all mail to you for at least the past fourteen days is always copied to your oldmail, a shadow, read-only mailbox. Your oldmail can only be read from CSLab's core servers; it is not currently accessible through IMAP or webmail. How to access it is described in our Oldmail page.

Vacation Autoreply Messages

To start a vacation autoreply, run

$ vacationmessage start

To stop your vacation autoreplies, run

$ vacationmessage stop

If you want to customize the message that people who write you will get, edit the file .vacation.msg in your CSLab home directory. People who email you several times will only get one autoreply a week, and no autoreplies will be sent for messages that the system thinks are spam.

Note: Stopping vacation autoreplies doesn't change or remove your vacation message, it just stops it being sent out, so you can use it later. If you customized your vacation message for a particular absence, don't forget to update it the next time you turn on your autoreply.

Email Forwarding

The recommended way to forward your mail elsewhere is to put the email address that you want to forward to in the file .forward-nonspam in your home directory. This will forward all non-spam email to the email address (or addresses) in the file; email tagged as spam will be quietly discarded (although all email, spam and non-spam, will continue to be copied to your oldmail). For example, if you wanted to forward your mail to My.Name@somewhere.ca, you would have a .forward-nonspam file that contained: My.Name@somewhere.ca If you wanted to also forward it to your UTORMail account, the file should contain:

My.Name@somewhere.ca
My.Name@utoronto.ca

An important caution: Whenever you set up or change your forwarding, you should send yourself a test message to make sure that everything is working correctly.

If you want to forward all your email, including spam-tagged email, put the email address that you want to forward to in the file .forward in your home directory instead. If you are a student, you should be aware that email forwarding falls under the university's Policy on Official Correspondence with Students, which states that: Students have the right to forward their University-issued electronic mail account to another electronic mail service provider address but remain responsible for ensuring that all University electronic message communication sent to the official University-issued account is received and read.

Note also that email forwarded to external email providers (such as Hotmail, Sympatico, or Yahoo) will be subject to their spam-filtering procedures. These providers vary in their attempts to reduce spam: some are so aggressive in their efforts that they may too frequently misidentify as spam legitimate email forwarded from university accounts. Because of this, please recognize that not all the legitimate email sent to your CS account may make it to your mailbox at the external provider.

Discarding Spam Automatically

If all the filtering you want to do is discard all of the messages to you that are tagged as spam or viruses, just create a .forward-nonspam file that contains: your_login_name (Change your_login_name to whatever your Unix login is.)

This will deliver all non-spam email to you as normal, and discard all of your spam mail.

Advanced Email Uses

Creating a Mailing List

CSLab lets anyone create simple mailing lists. Please see our mailing lists page for more information.

Using Both: .forward-nonspam and .forward

If you have both a .forward-nonspam and a .forward, email that is not tagged as spam is handled by your .forward-nonspam, while email that is tagged as spam is handled by your .forward instead of just being quietly discarded.

Vacation Autoreplies and Email Forwarding

Vacation autoreplies don't interfere or change your forwarding, and vice versa; you can have both active at once, and you can start or stop them independently.

(This means that turning your vacation autoreplies on or off does not change your .forward-nonspam or .forward files, or does not create them. vacationmessage start does create a default .vacation.msg file if you don't already have one.)

Email Filtering with .forward

As usual on Unix systems, your .forward (and .forward-nonspam) isn't limited to just email addresses; it can be used to, for example, run email through procmail. The details of how this works on CSLab are covered on our email filtering page.

Spam

Please see our spam page for more information on spam filtering.

Aliases

An email alias is simply an alternate name for your email address. You can achieve this by creating a mailing list of the desired name, such that your email address is the only address in the mailing list. Please see our mailing lists page for more information.