Introduction to Sending and Receiving Electronic Mail

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• How to Send/Receive Mail
• How to Send/Receive Mail Using Outlook, or Other POP3/IMAP/SMTP Compatable Software
• Forwarding Email Messages
• Mailing A File
• Using XMail
• Aliasing/Mail Lists
• Elm Aliasing
• Pine Aliasing
• Appending a Signature
• SMTPIN Spam Filter

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Introduction

By using email, you are able to send messages or entire files at your convenience to anyone, anywhere on the internet. The system automatically stores your mail until you are ready to read it. The mail clients available to you are Elm, Pine, Xmail, and Procmail. This guide is intended to introduce you to the basic uses of these programs. To learn about Procmail, read Procmail HowTo.

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How to Send/Receive Mail

Elm, Pine, and Xmail can be used to send and receive email and should be used from your home machine (ex. quake,shell,diablo). Procmail can be configured to sort incoming mail and do various processing tasks. Xmail must be used in an Xwindows environment (On a linux machine or through Xwin32 on a Windows machine). From the command line just type:

[program name] [-optional command line argument]

Type

[program name] -h for a list of command-line options.

Reading Email

To read email (a message tells you that you have received mail when you login), typing "elm" or "pine" will enter you into one of these two interactive, menu-driven mailers. After reading your mail, you can save it, reply, delete it, and a variety of other functions. See the elm man page for full details. Both Pico and Elm are menu-driven and fairly simple but if problems arise, consult the man pages: man pine, elm, xmail, procmail. Also, ACNS has online tutorials for both Pine and Elm here.

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How to Send/Receive Mail Using Outlook, or Other POP3/IMAP/SMTP Compatable Software

Your Computer Science e-mail may be accessed using any POP3/IMAP/SMTP compatable software, such as Microsoft Outlook, by entering in the following information into your software program: POP3 (or IMAP) server: mail.cs.fsu.edu
SMTP server: mail.cs.fsu.edu

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Forwarding Email Messages

To have your mail automatically forwarded to another mailbox you must modify your .forward file. At the command line when in your home directory type pico .forward add one line per address and save the file. If you would still like your mail to be sent to your cs account, you must also include a line with your cs address on it. All future incoming mails should be forwarded before they are placed in your mail directory.

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Mailing a file to another person

The procedure for sending a file to another person can be done from the command-line. The format for sending a file is:

% pine "address" <  "filename" (return)

EXAMPLE:

% pine bjp@sura.net < set.list  (return)

This command tells the system that you want to send mail to bjp@sura.net and the mail is to contain a file entitled set.list. The redirection sign < tells the system that a file is to be sent. To add a message to a file see the section on vi.

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Using Xmail

To view your mail with xmail while in a Linux environment just type xmail & at the command line. If you are on a Windows machine, then you will need to start an XWin-32 session. If you do not know how to do this, see XWin32. A divided screen will pop up with a list of all mail in the top half and a selected mail message open for reading on the bottom half. Scroll up/down to change the message selection. In the middle there are a number of menu options which are pretty intuitive to use. If you have your mail filtered with procmail, then you will need to specify which folder you would like to look at by typing in the pathname at the "File: " textbox and press the Folder button.

Sending a message with Xmail

The Xmail send button will open a window for you to type in your message. If you make a mistake, it is possible to edit the line that you are currently typing by simply backspacing and re-entering the text. To edit other lines you should use vi, the Unix text editor. When you are finished entering your message, to save and quit type :qw (return) You will then be prompted for subject, address, etc.

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Aliasing/Mail Lists

Elm Aliasing

To create an alias database in elm, do the following: 1. Edit this file: %HOME/.elm/aliases.txt In this format: alias-list-name = [lastname [; firstname]], optional comment = address-list

alias-list: a blank- or comma- separated list of alias names
address-list: a blank- or comma- separated list of addresses

Example:
me, myself = cahill; janel , What a gal = cahill@cs.fsu.edu, jlc0839@acns.fsu.edu,
janljovial@aol.com 

This creates two aliases for myself, namely "me" and "myself". Three addresses are associated with each alias and a name and a comment are also associated.

Personal or Group Aliases

A personal or individual alias has only one address in address-list,
as in:

dave, taylor = Dave Taylor = taylor@company.com

A group alias has two or more addresses in address-list, as in:

gurus = Unix Gurus = alan, john, dave, mike, richard, larry, t_richardson

Other Rules

Entries can be continued over several lines; the continuation lines must start with a blank (a space or tab).

A comment is any line starting with a number sign (#). It is ignored.

Blank lines and comments can be interspersed within entries.

2. Type the command newalias to update your elm alias list. 3. Run elm and .... use your aliases See Also: man newalias(1), elm(1)

Pine Aliasing

Using aliases in Pine is much easier than in elm, just go to the Pine Address book, select address, and write the address-list in the address space. See also: man pine(1)

Appending a Signature

In pine, you can create a custom signature by selecting Setup from the main menu, and by typing the signature command, s, from the setup menu. You will then be given a screen to type in your signature and choose ^X to save and exit. Your signature will then be automatically appended to all emails.

SMTPIN Spam Filter

We are going to retire the current GFI email scanner and migrate to MailScanner with MailWatch. MailScanner sits between two Sendmail processes; the first Sendmail receives mail, and does some checking of senders and recipients. If it is satisfied with both the sender and the recipients, it will enqueue the message for MailScanner. MailScanner will make a number of checks, including running SpamAssassin. If the message is accepted it is passed to an outgoing Sendmail process to go to mail.cs.fsu.edu for delivery.

If the message is not accepted by MailScanner, it quarantines the message. You can check the status of all of your email processed by MailScanner at https://smtpin.cs.fsu.edu, and you can modify your own preferences for blacklists, whitelists, and spam ratings that you find acceptable.

This new set up should benefit you in several ways:

(1) Transparency:

     (A) You will have full control over how much email you want to receive. If you want blatant spam delivered, you just have to set your personal spam settings to set "high spam" ratings 1000 or more.

     (B) You will also have full control of your own blacklists and whitelists.

     (C) You will also have a full trace of all email processed by MailScanner that is sent to you. (However, we will be using technology that will prevent email from the worst spammers from getting as far as MailScanner, so your view will only include email that makes it as far as MailScanner.)

     (D) High scoring spam won't be delivered to your mailbox unless you want it to be. Instead, it will be quarantined for fourteen days and then deleted.

Your interface for the new MailWatch system is https://smtpin.cs.fsu.edu

(2) Better spam fighting tools:

Sendmail and MailScanner are generally at the forefront of most new spam-fighting tools, such as GreetPause, CommandPause, and milters. You should see less spam, and of that spam that you do receive, more of it should be marked as spam. We will also be expanding our use of realtime blackhole lists to prevent spammers from even getting to the conversation stage with our mail machines.

(3) Safer virus handling:

We will be processing our email on a Linux machine; GFI was running on a Windows machine, and it is safer to handle the various hundreds of thousands of various Microsoft viruses on a Linux platform.

(4) Faster processing:

The new Linux server is more powerful hardware than the previous hardware running GFI. We also will be able to check with the new setup much earlier on if email is destined for legitimate addresses in the department; mail.cs.fsu.edu will have far less mail to attempt to deliver. From our tests so far, we are seeing a much reduced load on mail.cs.fsu.edu.

Presently, we don't have any solution for providing access to the quarantine for mailing list members.
If email to a mailing list is quarantined, you will have to contact the systems group to have it released.

The new system will prepend/append more detailed tags in the Subject line. If you rely on subject line to sort your emails, you may need to make necessary modifications to your filter rules.

[Filename] Filename is questionable (for instance, has been associated a worm breakout.)
[Bad Content?] Attachment to message triggered file content check
[Size] Size check occurred either on attachment or whole message
[DISARMED] Disarmed HTML tag in message
[Phishing] Found potential phishing attack
[SPAM] Found spam message
[BLATANT SPAM] Found blatant (high-scoring) spam