Email and News

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Overview

Email and electronic news group services are supplied by Unix servers. Client programs for accessing these services are supplied by the Waterloo Polaris network.

Electronic Mail

Anyone with a Waterloo Polaris account has an additional account on a Unix mail server in order to access email. Students using Waterloo Polaris are automatically provided this account when their Waterloo Polaris accounts are created.

The recommended client application for accessing email is Eudora Light, however Netscape also sports a mail client. In either case you must supply your log-in password the first time you read mail. It is the same as your Waterloo Polaris log-in password.

If you want to change your password on your email account, you can do so with the Configure Waterloo Polaris program, which will also change your Waterloo Polaris log-in password to match. You can also log in directly to your email account. Use the Telnet Presenter program (under Start / Programs / Network Software) to log in to your mail server (e.g. engmail) using your password. Use the command passwd at the Unix prompt to change your password.

Configuring Your Mail Client

Eudora Light is partially pre-configured for you, but you will have to tell it your email server password the first time you try to read mail. You will also be asked if you want to use Eudora Light as the default email program when you first use it. If you ever need to change any settings, look under Tools / Options in the menus.

There are numerous options for Eudora Light. You can get help from the program if you select an option and press the F1 function key. All of the options are preconfigured for you to reasonable values.

Getting Started Dialogue Box

In order to read mail you must supply a POP account. POP stands for Post Office Protocol. This account is the one which handles your mail. For example, in Engineering, the POP account is userid@engmail.uwaterloo.ca. You can choose to use another account for email if you have one.

In order to send mail you must supply the name of a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server. This will usually be the same computer as the POP server, and if so, you need not fill in the field. If you are reading your mail from home and using an Internet Service Provider (ISP) other than the UW dial-in server, please read the section Using Email from Off Campus.

There are numerous options under Checking Mail. Your local workstation must contact the mail server to see if you have any new mail. This can be done two ways: 1) only when you want to check, by clicking the Check Mail button in Eudora Light (the default), or 2) automatically, every time period specified in the Checking Mail options. To minimize network traffic, we recommend that you set automated checking to an interval not less than 15 minutes. If you intend to access your mail from other than Waterloo Polaris workstations (e.g. from home) you should also make sure that you leave your mail on the server, otherwise it will be downloaded to your Waterloo Polaris home directory and will not be easily visible from other computers. Eudora Light is preconfigured to remember your password after you first supply it.

Using Other Mail Clients

The information in the previous section also applies if you choose to use Netscape as your mail client. Use the Edit / Preferences / Mail and Newsgroups / Mail Server dialogue in Netscape Communicator to set the Incoming Mail Server (e.g. engmail.uwaterloo.ca) and Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server (the same as the incoming mail server, unless you are getting your mail from off campus through an ISP). You also need to put your name and email address in the Identity section.

If you prefer to use Pine (a text-based mail client) you can log in directly to your mail server account and run it there. This is often a good choice for mail reading if you are accessing your mail from multiple locations and computers and want to always use the same mail client.

Forwarding Mail

If you wish to forward your mail to another account, you will need to log in to your mail server directly. Log in to your mail server using Telnet Presenter (under Start / Programs / Network Software) then use a text editor such as Pico to create a file called .forward containing your forwarding address.
e.g. pico .forward

Alternately, use any text editor or word processor you like under Windows95 to create the .forward file (making sure to save it as text only), then use Rapid FTP (again under Start / Programs / Network Software) to place it on your mail server.

Using Mail from Off Campus

Your email account generally stays active as long as you are a student at UW (and for some period after you leave, varying according to your faculty). If you are on a work term or if you have a PC at home you will probably want to access your mail from off campus. To access mail remotely, you need three things:
  • a connection to the Internet
  • a terminal emulation program e.g. telnet, or an email client program such as Netscape, Eudora, Outlook, or Pine.
  • your password for your email account.

    One way of reading mail that will always work is to telnet in to your email account with your user ID and password. Then read and send mail with an email client program such as pine, which runs directly on your email server.

    The other way to do things is to use an email client program which runs on your local PC (e.g. Netscape, Eudora, Outlook) and connect to your mailbox using Post Office Protocol (POP), just like we do with Waterloo Polaris workstations. You will need to have established a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection to the Internet through the UW dial-in server or through your own ISP in order to use a POP email client.
    IMPORTANT! You will need to configure your POP email client with both the SMTP server (which takes care of sending mail) and your POP account (your account on your mail server, which receives your incoming mail). If you are using an ISP other than the UW dial-in server, you must specify your ISP's SMTP server and not your mail server at UW. Attempts to reduce unwanted junk mail passing through computers at UW have lead to the disabling of the "relay" feature of our SMTP servers. This means that mail originating from off campus will not be relayed to a destination off campus. So, if you are using an outside ISP and configure your email client with a UW SMTP server, mail intended for anyone off campus will not be sent.

    Reading News

    There are two news clients available on Waterloo Polaris, NewsXpress, and Netscape. For these programs to work you need to specify the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server on campus, news.uwaterloo.ca.

    You should also note that news.uwaterloo.ca does not serve news to off-campus computers (anyone not dialing in through the UW dial-in server). If you are using an off-campus ISP, you can request them to provide the UW news groups. Or, possibly, you can read the uw.* news groups through the Web, by searching for a Web site which links to them.

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