Access to U.Va. Email When You Are Away From Charlottesville
The following information applies primarily to people who have accounts
on ITC-supported systems at the University of Virginia. People who have
accounts on departmental systems will need to check with the Administrators
for those systems to learn what options are available for access to their
email when they are away from Charlottesville.
All people who are away from Grounds will need to authenticate to a
U.Va. email server or use their non-U.Va. Internet Service Provider's
mail server (ISP) before they will be allowed to send messages from their
U.Va. address. Information on authenticating to a U.Va. server is available
at the web site at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/smtpauth/abs.html
Information on sending messages via a departmental server is available
at the web site at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/smtpauth/
Where links are indicated in the following, you should visit the link,
print it, ask questions if you have them, before
you leave Charlottesville. You should take whatever pages you
have printed with you when you depart Charlottesville, so that you will
have them to help when you arrive at your non-Charlottesville location.
You will need to have a computer whose connection to the Internet is working
at your non-Charlottesville location before you will be able to access
these pages from that location.
If you will be away from Charlottesville, but would like to access your
U.Va. account to read email while you are away, there are a number of
ways you can proceed. Before you leave Charlottesville,
you should consider the following. Note that what is described in this
document can be done from places outside Charlottesville, but it is more
complicated (and sometimes more expensive) to do them after you have left
Charlottesville.
- If you have an account on the Central Mail Service (CMS), you can
access your email by establishing a connection to the internet and then
visiting the web site at:
http://www.mail.virginia.edu
You login to the Web Mail Service using your U.Va. Computing ID
(example: mst3k) and email password. The Web Mail Service is
not a full-featured email client and you will not have access to your
CMS addressbook through it, but it is useful for reading and sending
messages.
- If you have internet service through a provider here in the Charlottesville
area, you may want to contact them to see if they have connection in
your non-Charlottesville location that you can use. You will want to
ask if there is an extra charge to use such a service. If you are using
their software, you will also want to ask what changes you will have
to make to use the new service.
- If you have an email account on an Internet Service Provider (ISP
- like aol.com or hotmail.com),
you can forward your email to your account there.
Please check the caveats about this type of arrangement, shown in the
forward your email section, before you proceed
with this option.
- If you have an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in
the place you will be, you may be able to establish a connection to
their server and then access your U.Va. email from
the other ISP. This access will be either with a secure
telnet client or using the email client
that you normally use at U.Va. (like Mulberry, Eudora, Outlook
Express, or Netscape) or, for those whose accounts are on the CMS, via
the Web Mail Service at http://www.mail.virginia.edu.
- If you are going abroad, it is almost always a good idea to obtain
an account on a local system there (be aware that telephone charges
abroad are often billed by the number of minutes used!) and forward
your email to that account, or establish an account on a world-wide
system like hotmail.com and forward your messages to that account. Access
to U.Va. across oceans, even via a secure telnet client
or the CMS Web Mail Service, is slow. Please check the caveats
about this type of arrangement, shown in the forward
your email section, before you proceed with this option.
Remember to print any of the applicable pages before you leave, read
them, ask questions if you have them and take
the pages with you when you leave Charlottesville.
Obtaining secure telnet client for your system
Telnet is a computer program that is used to connect from your own computer
to a remote computer that could be in the next room or across the country.
You "tell the network" where you want to go and, if everything works correctly,
you are connected to the computer that you want to access. How telnet
is started on a computer depends on the type of computer (Mac/PC) and
on the operating system that you use. A secure version of telnet encrypts
your communication to protect the information you send over the network.
Information on the secure telnet clients that are available to members
of the U.Va. community can be found at the web site at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/security/personal.phtml
Forwarding your U.Va. email
to an account on another ISP
If you have an account on another ISP (like aol.com or hotmail.com)
you can forward your U.Va. email to that account. If you are considering
this option, please be aware of the following:
- other sites often do not allow you to store as many messages as U.Va.
allows you to store
- other sites frequently have a incoming message size limit that is
much smaller than what we at U.Va. allow (50 MB). Sometimes one attachment
that would have been delivered here is impossible to deliver to a hotmail.com
account.
To try to avoid the difficulties described above, after you have established
your forward on your U.Va. account, read your mail on the other system
frequently.
Please understand that if messages to your other address become undeliverable
and be returned to the U.Va. email postmaster, the U.Va. postmaster will
have the forward file on your U.Va. account removed (and you will receive
no further messages at the other ISP that were addressed to your U.Va.
address; new messages will remain in your U.Va. mailbox.)
Also know that if you establish an account on another ISP and fail to
read email on it on a routine basis, the account may be suspended as the
ISP will see it as an abandoned account; you cannot have an account and
hope to use it when it is convenient to you, you must access it on a routine
basis to keep it active.
Lastly, please remember to remove your forward file when you return
to U.Va. Forward files are meant to be temporary in nature. If your account
here is deleted, the forward file disappears with it and messages to your
address here will be returned to sender with a "user unknown" message.
Information about forwarding your email from an ITC server is available
at the web site at
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/forward.html
If you use a departmental computing system, you will have to talk with
its Administrator to learn how to forward from that system.
Accessing your U.Va. email account from another ISP
Information on accessing your UVa email account from
off-Grounds is available via the website at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/services/offgrounds.html
Configuring an email client
To configure email clients like Thunderbird or Outlook Express
to access your email after you have completed a connection to the internet,
you will need to know:
- your U.Va. Computing ID (example: mst3k) and password
- your incoming and outgoing SMTP server
If you use blue.unix, your incoming mail server is:
unix.mail.virginia.edu
and your outgoing SMTP server is:
smtp.mail.virginia.edu
If you use the Central Mail Service, you may determine these values
by logging into the web site at:
http://www.mail.virginia.edu
click the Settings tab, then click the link for Other
Clients
We recommend the use of IMAP configuration for these email
clients.
Please note that if you configure these email clients to use the POP
protocol and are not careful to tell the email client that it needs to
leave the messages on the server, when you use the client to read your
U.Va. email, the messages in your U.Va. mailbox will be put on the computer
on which you read the email and will remain on that computer (which may
not be your own computer, if you are visiting family or friends.)
Note that some ISP's, in an effort to prevent the relay of spam email
messages through their services, will not allow you to send messages using
a U.Va. outgoing SMTP server. You will have to configure your outgoing
SMTP server to reflect the outgoing SMTP server of the ISP to be able
to send messages.
Remember that information on authenticating to a U.Va. server is available
at the web site at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/smtpauth/abs.html
and that departmental computer users will need to learn how to use the
SMTP AUTH
service.
How you configure the email client depends on what client you are using
and on what system.
Macintosh email client configuration information is available at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/mac/
Windows email client configuration information is available at:
Eudora
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/eudora/home.html
or
Outlook Express
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/docs/outlookexpr/
If you have questions
If you have questions about any of the above, please contact the ITC
Help Desk via telephone at (434) 924-3731 or email consult@Virginia.edu. For Helpdesk/Call Center hours and location click here.
|
