BX:Mail

We run our own mail servers under the bx.psu.edu domain. Everyone who has a BX account can make use of the BX mail system. Your BX email address is <your_username>@bx.psu.edu.

Incoming mail for the domain is handled by a cluster of mail servers which make use of a separate cluster of antispam/antivirus scanning systems.

Mail that is "delivered locally" is delivered into your BX AFS home directory under the Maildir/ directory.

Accessing your BX Email

There are four ways to access your BX email.

Note: We NO LONGER support the POP protocol for mail access. Any resonably modern email client should support IMAP.

IMAP

Currently, the only mail-specific protocol we support is IMAP.

General Settings

• IMAP Server (Incoming): imap.bx.psu.edu, port 993 with SSL
• SMTP Server (Outgoing): smtp.bx.psu.edu, port 587 (submission), Authentication with TLS

NOTE: DO NOT USE PORT 25. Many ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25 in order to combat SPAM, including Penn State (which is why you must use smtp.bx.psu.edu to send email when you're on our network). In those cases, you must use port 587, as listed above.

Mail client specific settings

• Thunderbird under Linux
• Pine/Alpine
• OS X Mail.app

Your mail client not listed? Tell admin-at-bx.psu.edu

Webmail

There are two webmail systems available -

• SquirrellMail, which is a lightweight webmail system
• Horde/IMP, which is a full-featured webmail system with LDAP address book integration, among other useful features. This is the recommended webmail system, as it is currently clustered and set up to be as HA (highly available) as possible.

Both systems can be found by simply going to webmail.bx.psu.edu and selecting which one to use.

Accessing your Maildir/ directly

It is possible that some mail clients such as pine/alpine, mutt, etc are capable of accessing the contents of your Maildir/ directly. Example configurations are forthcoming.

Forwarding your mail

It is possible to forward mail sent to <username>@bx.psu.edu to another account.

The preferred method to forward your BX email is to use the BX Mail Forward Tool (weblogin), which directly edits the appropriate LDAP attributes for your BX account.

This can also be done via a .forward (dot forward) file, which is the traditional method, though this is not as straight forward as it ought to be because of AFS. Contact admin-at-bx.psu.edu if you would like to use this method.

Filtering with procmail

TODO

Mailing Lists

We run several public and public mailing lists. For more information, please see the Mailman list page.

Vacation auto-response

Vacation auto-replies are handled via a procmail rule.

Steps to enable it:

• This rule normally lives in $HOME/.procmail/rc.vacation. If you don't have this file, copy it from below or from /afs/bx.psu.edu/service/etc/skel/.procmail/rc.vacation.

$HOME/.procmail/rc.vacation

# Vacation rules
#
# See http://wiki.bx.psu.edu/BX:Mail#Vacation_auto-response for details

# Edit $PMDIR/vacation.msg to change the message contents
MSG=$PMDIR/vacation.msg

# Only edit below this line if you know what you're doing.

# Filter on messages only addressed to $YOU, not a mailing list, not spam, and check for loops
# Add the sender to vacation.cache so we don't respond to them more than once
:0 Whc
* $ ^TO_${YOU}
* !Precedence: (list|bulk)
* !X-Spam-Flag: YES
* $ !^X-Loop: ${YOU}
| $FORMAIL -rD 8192 $PMDIR/logs/vacation.cache

# this only gets executed if the previous rule returned success (the 'e')
:0 ehc
| ($FORMAIL -rA"Precedence: junk" -I"Reply-To: $YOU" -A"X-Loop: $YOU" ; cat $MSG) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

• Include these lines in $HOME/.procmail/procmailrc. If you don't already have $HOME/.procmail/procmailrc, copy it from /afs/bx.psu.edu/service/etc/skel/.procmail/procmailrc

Snippet from $HOME/.procmail/procmailrc

INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.vacation

The rc.vacation file should be included before any existing rules (and if you already use procmail, you already know that)

• Edit $HOME/.procmail/vacation.msg to set the contents of the auto response message.

• When you're back from vacation, or wherever you were, comment out the INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.vacation line, and delete $HOME/.procmail/logs/vacation.cache. The vacation.cache file is what prevents senders from getting the auto-response more than once.