New Student E-mail Server May Require Changes to Your E-mail Client

By Dr. Ty Young, UNIX Systems Administrator

As we reported in last month's Benchmarks Online, users of the Computing Center’s student E-mail system (known by some as "Jove") can look forward to faster, more trouble-free E-mail connections in the future. In the latter part of February the Computing Center’s Academic Computing Services UNIX group will be migrating all E-mail accounts (including all mail folders and inboxes) over to a faster and more powerful system. WWW page material and other miscellaneous files will remain on Jove for use by their owners.

Problems for non-supported E-mail clients

While ACS expects that the transition will occur fairly smoothly, we also know that there will be problems for a few users. Most of these problems, we believe, will be for users who choose to use non-supported E-mail clients ("programs") such as Netscape’s Communicator E-mail program, Microsoft’s Outlook Express and other IMAP4-compliant clients. ("Supported?", you say? Well, ACS officially supports ONE E-mail client for student use, and that’s Simeon 4.1.x.) That said, here are a few guidelines for making the programs read your E-mail on the new system properly. Though you may need to make a few additional adjustments yourself, these settings worked for us:

• Netscape Communicator 4.x: The only thing that needs to change is your mail server’s folder locations. On the current system, you use ‘~/mail’ as a folder location. On the NEW system, however, you’ll use INBOX./ because, using the new system, both your ‘inbox’ (recently-arrived mail) and your mail folders (saved-messages and sent-mail, for example) all occupy the same space (on the current system, your ‘inbox’ is stored on a different disk from your mail folders.)

• Microsoft Outlook Express: The ‘root folder path’ should be left EMPTY. After making this change, you’ll want to use the ‘View’ menu to select the ‘Get complete folder list’ option, which will read in all of your folders. At that point, you should be done.

But not for Simeon . . .

If you’re using Simeon 4.1.x, of course, you won’t need to make any changes because we’ve instituted the settings on the IMSP server. You don’t need to know this specifically, but in addition to the mail (IMAP) server we run a separate, IMSP server which contains both global and user options — things like your real name, which desktop windows you had open the last time you used the server, etc. Netscape’s and Microsoft’s E-mail clients, however, don’t use the IMSP protocol, so you have to fool with the settings yourself — another reason to use Simeon!

When all else fails

Remember, too, that you can always contact the Helpdesk (565-2324) if you’re having trouble getting your E-mail working properly after we switch over to the new server. We’ll get you up and running in just a few short minutes!