1. "How do I forward my EECS email to a different email address?"
2. "I have my EECS account setup to forward my EECS e-mail to another account. How do I stop this?"
3. "How can I access my EECS email account?"
4. "How can I set up spam blockers for my e-mail inbox?"
5. "Why can't I send e-mails from off campus using my e-mail client?"
6. "What e-mail protocols does the EECS e-mail server support?"
7. "What e-mail clients does the EECS e-mail server support?"
8. "Can I access my e-mail using my web browser?"
9. "What are the outgoing and incoming EECS mail servers?"

With all of the email addresses to people, and interfaces to check that email with, some people prefer to be able to check their email from one location (as opposed to 2 or more). This is fairly easy but, a word of caution:

There have been reports that students utilizing 'free' web-mail services, such as HotMail and Yahoo, have not received certain important pieces of email from their professors or project partners over the last few terms. When email is being forwarded to an off-site system, there is next to nothing that we can do to discover why an email was lost. These services do impose space limits as well as message limits (total email messages in your Inbox). It appears that if an inbound email message causes one of the quotas to be exceeded, it simply gets dropped with no error and potentially not even a note to the original sender that something went wrong.

If you choose to utilize one of these services for EECS email forwarding, the EECS staff cannot be held responsible for email lost due to external factors!

Login to the EECS mail server and at the Unix/Linux prompt, type the following:

echo <username>@otherserver.com' > .forward

This creates a text file that contains one line consisting of only the email address that you want to forward to. For example, if I wanted to forward my EECS email to joeuser@ku.edu, I would type the following:

echo 'joeuser@ku.edu' > .forward

Next to set are the permissions. Type the following at the prompt:

chmod 755 .forward

That's it. From this point forward, all email sent to your EECS email address will be forwarded to your preferred email address.

Remove the .forward file in your home directory.

rm ~/.forward

There are four main ways you can access your EECS email account

1. Login to our web mail client at https://webmail.eecs.ku.edu using your EECS account login information.
2. Configure your favorite email client to retrieve your EECS email (see "What are the outgoing and incoming EECS mail servers?").
3. SSH into one of the EECS cycle servers using your EECS account login information (if you are unsure about what the cycle servers are see "What is SSH?"). Once logged into a cycle server use the pine command to access the your email account via the terminal.
4. Forward your EECS email to your preferred email account (see "How do I forward my EECS email to a different email address?").

This is a rather involved process, but it is extremely effective at reducing the spam load in your inbox. Agressive spam management is reccommended, but voluntary. This FAQ item will help you do that. We're going to set up a program called SpamAssassin(http://spamassassin.apache.org/.) The following configuration will run spam controls on all of the email that you receive automatically, and filter out spam based on a few spam-targeting parameters. In your home directory, create and edit a text file called .procmailrc, using gedit, or your favorite text editor:

gedit .procmailrc

Inside of this file, add the following lines of code in order to do a base routing through SpamAssassin:

#send mail through SpamAssassin.
:0 fw
| /usr/bin/spamc

This instructs the mail processor, procmail(http://www.procmail.org/) to send your mail through spam assassin. If the message looks like spam, its header will be flagged as such. In the unlikely event that it can't find SpamAssassin, it passes the email on as if nothing has happened, ensuring mail delivery. Next, you should also add this, just under the first block of code:

:0:
* X-Spam-Flag: YES
.spam

This will send all e-mail suspected to be spam to a folder called spam. If you prefer to just automatically delete any e-mail suspected to be spam, change the .spam line to /dev/null.

Currently, our servers do not support client authorizations, and in order to prevent our server from becoming a spam machine, we have restricted its use to clients on the KU campus. We are currently working on adding an SMTP-AUTH component that will allow for this, but until then, our webmail will still work from any location. See:"Can I access my e-mail in my web browser?"

The EECS webservers support SMTP for users on the EECS network. To retrieve your mail you can use POP3, or IMAP. Make sure to enable the SSL encryption certificate in your client. You might get an error about the certificate the first time you login. This is nothing to be concerned about as your connection will still be encrypted if you accept it. We recommend you permanently accept this certificate.

The EECS mail server supports the basic functionality of all modern e-mail clients. We test the server on a regular basis using Pine, Thunderbird, EECS webmail and Outlook.

The EECS department has a fully fledged webmail site which you can use to receive, send, and manage your messages. Login at (https://webmail.eecs.ku.edu/) using your EECS username/password.

Simply set your outgoing and incoming mail server settings to (mail.eecs.ku.edu).