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EMAIL and Mail Lists at CSAIL

EMAIL at CSAIL

CSAIL Email vs. MIT Email

MIT students, faculty, and staff members receive an MIT email address and can read and send email via MIT's Athena mailhubs. The Athena mail system provides you with an address at mit.edu, which you may prefer to give out because it it short and prestigious. You will also receive a CSAIL account. You may like to read your mail at CSAIL because we provide slightly better spam control. Also, CSAIL serves fewer users than MIT, so your first choice for an account name is more likely to be available at CSAIL than at MIT. You can use the two accounts separately or forward one to the other for convenience.

  • You could keep your MIT and CSAIL mail accounts completely separate. If you don't change anything, you will need to log into each account separately to read all of your mail.

  • You could have your CSAIL email forwarded to your MIT account, or to another destination entirely (Gmail, or your research group's mailhub). To forward your CSAIL email, log into any CSAIL Debian machine (your own workstation or ssh to login.csail.mit.edu) and run inquir-chfwd. Please note that the conventional UNIX means of forwarding email, placing a .forward file in your home directory, will not work.

Account Creation and Management

Before you can create your email account, you must Get a web certificate.

Vacation Auto-responder Instructions

  • 1. Please type imap.csail.mit.edu into your browser
  • 2. Click the link that reads "Configure server-side mail filtering and vacation auto-responder"
  • 3. Log in with your csail email address and password
  • 4. Click the link that reads "set vacation"
  • 5. At this point you can create any message you like.
  • 6. Don't forget to click the "save changes" button.

Please Note You will need valid CSAIL web certificates to do the above. Also, this is best handled by the user as it is exponentially more difficult for a member of TIG to set this up.

Mail Clients

You can read your mail at any time through the Horde webmail interface.

You can also read your mail using an IMAP mail client. CSAIL supports most of the common IMAP clients. We no longer support Eudora and strongly discourage using it. The most popular client is Mozilla Thunderbird. Debian Linux includes Icedove, which is identical in all ways to Thunderbird except the icons and the name have been changed to conform with Debian licensing policies.

Even if you don't use the Horde web mail interface for reading, you should use it to configure filters. Any configuration you create in Horde will work wherever you read your mail. If you configure filters locally in your mail client, they will only work in that one place.

How to Configure an IMAP Client

Hidden Folders

If you configure folders using the Horde webmail interface, you may not automatically see them in an IMAP client. Also, there are a few 'hidden' folders that are useful for spam filtering. Here's how to subscribe to a hidden folder.

Spam Filtering

CSAIL provides spam filtering using SpamAssassin, a powerful free software solution. It works automatically on the mail server. You can change the settings so that it works better for you.

  • Change basic SpamAssassin configuration.
  • Subscribe to the Spam folder if you want to see messages that the server has marked as spam and check for false positives.
  • To report missed spam to the server, subscribe to the folder MissedSpam. Then drag any spam from your inbox to the MissedSpam folder. The server will read it automatically.
  • If you are getting "false positives," then subscribe to the NotSpam folder. Drag the message from Spam to NotSpam. The server will start 'learning' messages that you mark as NotSpam. After a few iterations, it should stop marking these messages as spam.

Virus filtering

The Clam anti-virus package checks all incoming email for viruses. Note that email virus scanning does not replace having up to date virus scanners on your own machine, but it should help cut down on the problems.

Other Email Tips

Mailing Lists at CSAIL

CSAIL uses Mailman, the GNU mailing list manager for mailing lists. Mailman is self service. As long as you have a CSAIL web certificate, you can may create, modify, or delete a mailing list. Access Mailmain by pointing your browser to https://lists.csail.mit.edu.

Basic Mailman Documentation

List Member Documentation

If you just need to subscribe or unsubscribe to a list, check out the List Member Documentation

List Manager Documentation

If you want to create lists or manage existing lists, go see either the quick reference guide or the complete guide.

Mailman Tips

Mailman passwords are insecure

Mailman is not designed with password security in mind. Do not use the same password for Mailman that you do for anything important.

Spam control adds complexity

By some estimates 80% of all email on the net is spam. Whether that's true or not is less important than how much people hate getting even one piece of spam. No one welcomes spam transmitted by mailing lists. Mailman's spam control features make it harder to understand and configure. But it is worth taking some time to understand them to keep your list spam-free.

Some lists are 'hidden.'

Hiding lists offers some limited spam protection. You can get a list of all public mailing lists at https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo. If you have inherited responsibility for a list and don't see it on this page, send mail to help@csail.mit.edu and we'll help find it for you.