On this page you will find information to help you fully utilize your OCF account's mail capabilities:
- How do I read mail on the UNIX system?
- I'd like to use POP. What settings do I need? (Outlook, Eudora)
- I'd like to use IMAP. What settings do I need?
- Should I use POP or IMAP?
- What are the SMTP settings for sending mail?
- What other mail programs are there?
- How do I forward my mail?
- Are there any good methods of dealing with spam?
- How can I filter/sort my mail?
There are many mail programs available on the UNIX system. One of the most common and easiest to use programs is called pine. Pine can be run from the UNIX prompt simply by typing pine at the UNIX prompt. Much of the user interface is simple and the one-keystroke commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. Type man pine for more information.
Our POP server is mail.ocf.berkeley.edu. Your user name is your login name, and your mailing address is login@ocf.berkeley.edu, where login refers to your login name. So if your login name were foo, your mailing address would be foo@ocf.berkeley.edu.
We also support POP over SSL. SSL, the Secure Sockets Layer, is the same technology used in secure website transactions. Using this option will make it exceedingly difficult for eavesdroppers to sniff your password or the contents of your email while it goes from our server to your computer. Therefore, we recommend using SSL if your email client supports it. Most email clients supporting SSL will have some checkbox or similar that you can select in the mail server settings.
Our IMAP server is also mail.ocf.berkeley.edu. The same information for POP mentioned above also apply to IMAP. In particular, we also support IMAP over SSL.
This depends on your needs. POP is ideal if you like to download your messages to your computer and read them offline, or if you typically only use one computer for reading your mail. IMAP allows you to read your mail selectively instead of downloading everything at once--you can save messages to your own computer as needed. Also, IMAP is a good choice if you want to access your mail from multiple locations (and assuming you have an IMAP mail client available at each location), since your messages generally remain on our server. Most popular mail clients today (e.g., Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, and Eudora) support both POP and IMAP.
Our SMTP server is smtp.ocf.berkeley.edu. Please note that if you are using our SMTP server from a remote location (e.g., not from an OCF computer), then you must use your OCF email address as the "From" address -- you cannot use your CalMail address instead, for example. Restricting the outgoing email to our domain helps cut down on spammers using our server to send spam.
There are many other mail programs that the OCF has installed and ready for use. The first is elm, another full-screen mail program like pine. It is a little smaller and a little faster than pine, and has some different utilities. Standard on most systems is mail, which provides an interactive shell for you to read your mail. This program generally carries a bit of a learning curve but is essentially universal on every flavor of UNIX available. Another powerful mail tool is MH, or Mail Handler. This carries the highest learning curve of all but is very powerful and is command-line driven, where, after each command, one returns to the command prompt. The newest install on the OCF is a program called mutt, a mail reader based on the elm mail client.
For more information about pine, type man pine at the UNIX prompt. Similarly, for elm, type man elm, for mail, man mail, for mutt, man mutt, and MH, man mh.
Our mail delivery system looks for a file called .forward to determine whether it needs to deliver your mail elsewhere. To create a forward file, either edit the file ~/.forward and insert your destination address there, or type:
echo "login@remotehost" > ~/.forward
where login@remotehost is your other email address, such as foo@yahoo.com. You can actually forward mail to any number of other email addresses simply by putting each destination address on a separate line in your .forward file. It is also possible to retain a copy of the forwarded message in your local mail spool. To do this, you would simply add the following line to your .forward file:
\login
In the \login line above, login refers to your OCF username. You can get this information by typing about forwarding at your UNIX prompt or, alternatively, checking the manual by typing man forward
If you would like to forward your UCLink mail to your OCF account, click
here:
http://weblink.berkeley.edu:8000/menu.forward.html
(uclink site)
A mail filter called SpamAssassin is installed on our systems. Whenever email arrives for you, it will automatically be sent to SpamAssassin, which will guess if it is spam or not, based on the contents of the email. It will then "tag" the email with some additional mail headers you can use to decide how to respond. For example, if it looks like the message is not spam, you may see a header like the following:
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,
HTML_FONTCOLOR_UNSAFE,HTML_FONT_INVISIBLE,HTML_MESSAGE,
NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP,WEIRD_PORT autolearn=no version=2.63
This means that the message received a score of -2.6, and that a score
of 5.0 is required before the message is considered spam. Thus, this
message is not spam. Analogously, below is an example of a message that
would be considered spam:
X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=29.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99,CLICK_BELOW_CAPS,
DATE_IN_FUTURE_03_06,DATE_SPAMWARE_Y2K,FORGED_MUA_EUDORA,
FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD,HTML_50_60,HTML_FONTCOLOR_RED,HTML_FONT_BIG,
...
You can set your email client to filter based on the X-Spam-Status
header (for example, you can create a filter to direct mail to a mail
box designated for spam if the message contains the partial line
"X-Spam-Status: Yes". Some email clients nowadays also have built-in
spam filtering functionality, which you can use instead of, or even in
conjunction with, our spam filter.
If you don't want to filter the email on your own computer, or you read email directly from our machines using a program like Pine or Mutt, you can have suspected spam delivered to a folder called "spam" (for example). Then you can periodically check the spam folder and verify that SpamAssassin didn't accidentally put any valid email there. In practice, this seems to work quite well.
Here is how to redirect suspected spam into a mailbox named "spam". If you don't already have a .forward file (described above) and you don't already have a .procmailrc (if you don't know what this is, then don't worry about it), then we have a basic script you can use that does this for you. To run the script, log into an OCF machine (using SSH) and run the command spam-setup. After running this script, suspected spam will be delivered to a folder called "spam", and all other mail will go to your normal inbox. Note that the script will not let you forward mail elsewhere, at the moment. You can add this manually, however. If you need help with this, feel free to email the staff.
Important note: If you opt for this approach, you really should check the spam folder periodically because sometimes, legitimate (and possibly important) mail can find its way in there. Also, spam accumulates faster than you would probably think, and your spam folder can easily consume a large portion of the disk space allocated to you (i.e., your quota) if you haven't checked and deleted spam for a couple months. The size of your spam folder counts against your disk quota, and you could run into unexpected problems with your account if you exceed quota.
There are many ways to sort your mail. MH has a package called slocal that can take a rules file and work with that. By far the most powerful mail sorting utility, though, is a program called procmail. Procmail has a pretty steep learning curve but is extremely useful. You can find a step by step guide to procmail and mail filtering here. You can find out more about slocal by typing man slocal at your UNIX prompt, and more about procmail by typing man procmail and man procmailrc at your UNIX prompt. Pine also has sorting rules which you can check out under the main menu: Setup, then Config. Scroll down for a while.