Email

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Email has become one of the most important means of communication among people here, in part because they may not be physically anywhere near their collaborators. Also, being a 'non-intrusive' communication is helpful - if you send someone an email and they're not available to reply right away, they can take their time formulating a response instead of needing to on the spot, or promising a return phone call later when time is available. Quite handy for those 4AM questions that pop up. This section will explain a bit about email, including links for setting up various mail clients in the building, as well as some of the details of our email setup here in Peyton Hall.

Email basics

While email has become an important and common method of communication, many don't quite understand the details that go behind pressing 'send' in your client. What follows is a brief explanation of how that all works.

How it works

When you compose an email to send somewhere, your mail client generates a series of text which describes the details of the message. There's a few headers written, including who the mail is from (your From: address), the destinations (To:, CC: and BCC: for blind carbon-copied messages - those which are sent somewhere, but not written in the message itself so other recipients are unaware it was sent to them), the Date: header saying when the message was written, and a Subject: header for the subject line of the message. Some clients will also include other headers, such as priority (which works differently in different mail clients) or headers to identify the client program and version. The email is now ready to be sent to a server that speaks Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP.

In some cases, when you send a mail, the message is handed off to a SMTP client program such as Sendmail running from the command line (/usr/bin/sendmail). This client program will take the message and handle speaking SMTP to the mail server. In other cases, your mail client will speak SMTP directly to the server. In both cases, the conversation is fairly short; the client tells the server what information it needs, known as the "envelope headers", so called because they could be different than what the message itself has for recipients and headers (ie, if you're sending a BCC of an email to someone, the envelope recipient is that person, even though their name doesn't exist in the actual headers of the email). Once the headers are passed, the client tells the server it's now sending the data of the message, sends the data, then signals that the message is done. At that point, the mail server can either accept the message completely - usually giving a kind of tracking number for the email - or reject it, which should cause the client to pop up an error that the mail could not be delivered. Should the mail be accepted, it is now the responsibility of the mail server which accepted the mail to either deliver it one step closer to the recipient, or return a message to the sender to say that the message could not be delivered. It is unacceptable to have a legitimate email discarded by a mail server and no "delivery status notification" sent back to the sender of the message.

Once the SMTP server holds the mail, it looks at it to determine who needs a copy, and where they are. Through some clever Domain Name Service (DNS) entries, it can tell where a mail for a certain person needs to be delivered, and will contact that server (unless this SMTP server is configured to send all mail to a "relay host", in which case it will relay the message up the chain and that host will now be responsible for delivery - this is common if you have an ISP which requires all emails be sent through their own servers, and not directly from your home computer). Once the SMTP server knows where to hand off the message, it initiates a connection to that server and repeats the process, adding to the message a few headers to mark the email's travels through itself (in most cases, a "Received:" header to show that it received the message and handed it off, while in some cases there may be a few headers added if the message was scanned for spam & viruses). This process will continue to repeat, until an SMTP server holds the message and must deliver it locally somehow.

When the local SMTP server holds the mail, it may be delivered many ways depending on the local configuration. In many cases, the mail will be scanned for viruses and spam content, and assuming the message passes it will be delivered. Some mail storage systems work with plain text files for holding messages, so the mail server can deliver them internally. Others use the Local Mail Transport Protocol (LMTP) to pass a message on to a mail server daemon which clients will connect to for reading mail (using either Post Office Protocol v3 (POP3) or Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP)).

As mentioned before, if a SMTP daemon cannot deliver a message any closer to the recipient for some reason, it has two choices for what to do:

1. Reject the message, and the sending program (SMTPD or client) is now responsible for notifying the sender somehow
2. Generate a Delivery Service Notification (DSN) message to the sender, notifying them that their email could not be delivered and why

In some cases, DSNs are sent because the recipient does not exist, or their mailbox is full. Sometimes it may be because a virus was detected in the email, or because the mail appeared to be spam (or had enough characteristics to make it 'spammy'). It could also be that the recipient's SMTP server is not responding, in which case you'll see the familiar "Message could not be delivered for 4 hours; will keep trying for up to 5 days" DSN. These mean just what they say: the message could not be delivered in the last four hours, but the program will keep trying to deliver it (usually once every hour) until it is five days old, at which time it will send another DSN to let you know the mail could not be delivered at all. Because SMTP servers will hold messages like this, mail tends to always go through even if a mail server is down for a while. All those trying to send mail to it will just hold their messages and wait until a later time, so the worst problem you'll usually see is that messages are delayed an extra hour from when the server is brought back online.

If you'd like to know how our mail system here is configured, see the below section "The nasty details".

Using email in Peyton Hall

There's a few ways to read your email while in Peyton Hall, which are outlined here. A word on "support" first, however. Because there are so many different ways to access email, we cannot possibly support every permutation of them. However, we have selected a few programs which are widely used and easily setup so that we can guarantee support with those programs. This does not mean you must run only one of those programs; you're free to use whatever software you like for reading and sending emails. However, if the program you've chosen does not work properly, or has some kind of problems that are not a fault of the mail server itself, you will be on your own to figure out the problem and corresponding solution. See Other clients below for information if you wish to use an unsupported email client.

Supported clients

Pine

From any Unix/Linux machine in the building, there's two main options for viewing your email. The first is Pine, a text-based email program which will work over SSH connections as well as while you're sitting in front of a machine in Peyton. While it may not have all the whiz-bang features of a GUI mail client, Pine is still in use by many and is a good no-frills (or low-frills) program to use for accessing email. Because of the way we have it configured, we can also guarantee that even if nothing else works, Pine should be able to read your mail no matter what - as long as the mail server itself is running. You can find more information about Pine in the article linked above in this section.

Thunderbird

Another supported client in the building is Thunderbird. This is what became of the mail client portion of the Mozilla suite. Thunderbird is a great IMAP client with many plugins and extensions that can help you effectively and efficiently use your email. Since it supports encryption and secure connections, you can configure Thunderbird for use on your laptop, and it will work the same if you're in the building or sitting at home. More information on Thunderbird is available in its own article (linked above).

Squirrelmail

Squirrelmail is an IMAP client which is accessed via a web interface. We run Squirrelmail on the mail server directly, and using a SSL certificate for encryption means your user name and password are not sent in-the-clear for others to see. You can do just about anything through Squirrelmail as you would with any other mail client, with the added benefit that you don't need anything more than a web browser to access it. The downside, of course, is if you don't trust the computer in front of you (for example, in an Internet cafe or web kiosk). But if you're visiting some other institution and have web access, you can read and reply to emails with Squirrelmail. You can use the article link above to see more information.

Other clients

For unsupported email clients, we have some information here which may be useful in getting it setup to access the mail server. If you have information about another client, you're welcome to either add it here, or if it's a large article create a new page for it and link to it in here instead.

• VM is an email client that runs within Emacs.

Email FAQ

• Using Other Mail Tools
• Getting Your Mail in One Place
• Duplicate Emails
• Mailbox Monitoring
• IMAP utilities
• Missing Folders in Squirrelmail
• Exporting Email
• Using Fetchmail
• Procmail (old message filtering system)
• Email Virus Scanning
• Spam Filtering
• Mail Filtering via Websieve
• Mailman, the Mailing List Software
• The Nasty Details
• Because it messes up the natural order of reading, and is hard to understand
• Why am I not getting important system announcements
• Whitelist in Mozilla Mail

See also Mailing Lists for information about the mailing lists available.