EMAIL MECHANISMS FOR LINUX/UNIX USERS
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

Zeth Green
(Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing/Business School)
and
Aaron Sloman
(School of Computer Science)

Last updated: 8 Sep 2009
Originally created: Feb 2007 (or earlier)

WARNING: IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT THIS FILE IS NOW OUT OF DATE
Please see http://www.helpdesk.bham.ac.uk/email/
e.g.

    http://www.helpdesk.bham.ac.uk/email/set_up_email_programs.shtml
    http://www.helpdesk.bham.ac.uk/email/iPhone_Exchange_email_setup.pdf

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CONTENTS

• PLEASE SEE THE WARNING ABOVE
• Introduction
• Email and Security
• Redirecting ADF Email to another mail server
• Accessing your Email on the ADF Email Server from a remote machine
  • IMAP
  • POP3
  • Exchange
• Example - Fetchmail and Mutt
  • Use fetchmail to get the mail to your unix/linux machine
  • Use Authenticated SMTP and Mutt to send email.
• Note on using HTML in email
• Maintained by

Introduction

This is a first draft attempt to provide general information about accessing your email on campus if you are not a Windows user. These instructions were provided by Zeth Green and installed here after minor editing by Aaron Sloman.

It is assumed that you are a member of the University of Birmingham and have a central email account as a member of the University on the 'ADF server' (Active Directory Fsomethingorother server). The instructions below enable you to use central University email with any email setup on a machine on or off campus.

There are two options

• Getting all your incoming mail redirected to another mail server as soon as it arrives.
• Accessing your mail remotely using another machine, on campus or elsewhere.

These two options are described in more detail below, after a note on security.

Email and Security

Most email is transmitted in a form that means that it can easily be read on any machine through which it passes, and it is usually the case that mail that you send or receive goes through several different machines on the internet between the sender's machine and the receiver's machine. A widely used protocol for sending email is SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) described Here on Wikipedia

The contents of a mail message can be made more secure by encrypting the contents, e.g. using 'Secure SMTP' as described in this technical document. A less technical document on authentication is here in Wikipedia.

Secure SMTP uses transport-layer security to provide private, authenticated communication over the Internet. This gives SMTP agents the ability to protect some or all of their communications from eavesdroppers and attackers.

If you don't know what that means see if advice at Brown University makes it any clearer.

Some additional information is provided here.

Beware of false promises
Neither government ministers nor internet services should be believed when they claim that total security can be provided.

Redirecting ADF Email to another mail server

Accessing or redirecting email from an address of the form NAME@bham.ac.uk

If you are a computer scientist then you probably do not want to use the central email: instead you probably want to get your central email to be automatically redirected to your CS email. Similarly if you have email access in another school that runs its own email service.

There are two ways to do this

• You can redirect email sent to your central email account by using this form: http://www.mailhub.bham.ac.uk/exec/new_redirect.pl

• Alternatively you can follow the instructions given here: http://www.email.bham.ac.uk/addresses_mrs.shtml

  Send an email message to mail-request@bham.ac.uk with a message body containing the following two lines, the first specifying your current central email address (without 'bham.ac.uk') and the second specifying your new address:

  Mailname: mailname
  Destination: destination for electronic mail

  You can give multiple 'Destination' lines if you wish mail to be forwarded to more than one place. There are examples on the web site.

Unfortunately, as many have discovered, this will not direct all email, e.g. email from someone on campus who uses the microsoft exchange system.
Zeth has provided the following explanation:

As far as I know, it is caused mainly by people typing human names into Microsoft Outlook and expecting the global ADF address list to find them. This unfortunately sends email direct to the mailbox, i.e. blairt@adf.bham.ac.uk rather than to the mailname t.blair@bham.ac.uk. Thus bypassing any redirects that the recipient has set up and usually failing to get anyone who has an email address hosted outside the central ADF servers (e.g. computer science).

That sounds plausible. There is an equally bad fault in the system. Apparently if such a user sends a message to someone off campus, with a Cc to a person on campus, instead of putting the correct campus email address in the Cc list, it inserts the 'exchange' address. So that recipient may never see the message, and moreover, if there is a reply from the external user, will never see the reply either as it will go straight to the mailbox, bypassing any redirects set up.

PLEASE SEE THE WARNING ABOVE

Accessing your Email on the ADF Email Server from a remote machine

There are three different protocols available.

• IMAP

  This is preferable if you want to leave your email on the server and not keep a local copy for offline reading.

  Install the following settings on your local mail browser/reader, e.g. thunderbird.

  Incoming server : imap4.bham.ac.uk
  Outgoing server : smtp.bham.ac.uk

  Replace that with 'auth-smtp.bham.ac.uk' if you wish to use authenticated (secure) SMTP.

  
  Username : your University username (e.g. smithj)
  

• Pop3

  This is preferable if you want to download and keep the email locally.

  Use these settings in your local mail client (e.g. Thunderbird).

  Incoming server : pop3.bham.ac.uk
  Outgoing server : smtp.bham.ac.uk
  (or auth-smtp.bham.ac.uk if you wish to use authenticated SMTP)
  Username : your University username
  Password : your University password

• Exchange

  This can be used for Evolution and perhaps other graphical email clients. This is useful if you want to use the University calendar.

  Server name : one of:

  adf.bham.ac.uk (on campus),
  ex1.bham.ac.uk (staff off campus),
  ex2.bham.ac.uk (students off campus)

  Username : your University username
  Password: your University password

  NOTES:
  1. Apparently the ex1 and ex2 mail servers can be accessed in a web browser, e.g. firefox.
  2. Although (at present) you cannot get your 'exchange' email automatically redirected to another address, you can use the 'fetchmail' mechanism described below, to get it automatically fetched to a linux machine, so that you are not forced to use a graphical mail browser to read it.

Example - Fetchmail and Mutt

I set myself up to use Mutt for reading and sending mail on a linux machine.

(There are other possible programs for reading and sending, e.g. Pine.)

Use fetchmail to get the mail to your unix/linux machine
Fetchmail periodically uses pop3 or some other specified protocol to download any new email.

You can control what fetchmail does by means of your ~/.fetchmailrc file.

E.g. start the .fetchmailrc file with the following, where the first line makes fetchmail run every 600 seconds (i.e. every 10 minutes) and the second line specifies useful defaults for the 'poll' command, used below:

set daemon 600
defaults proto pop3 port 110 mimedecode

Lines like the following (with appropriate user name and password) can then specify mail servers to fetch email from. In this case the 'protocol pop3' information duplicates the specification above in the 'defaults' line and could be removed.

poll pop3.bham.ac.uk protocol pop3 user "USERNAME" password "PASSWORD"

Note: if you want to leave the mail on the remote server after copying it, you can add the word 'keep' at the end.
Fetchmail gives other options which are explained in its 'man' file.

Use Authenticated SMTP and Mutt to send email.
To allow mutt to send via the university auth-smtp service, add the following line to your ~/.muttrc file:

set sendmail="/usr/bin/nbsmtp -D -s -U USERNAME -P PASSWORD -d bham.ac.uk -h auth-smtp.bham.ac.uk -f USERNAME@bham.ac.uk"

Replace 'nbsmtp' with the command for 'smtp' on your system.

NOTE:
You can use 'fetchmail' as described above without using 'mutt'.
The fetchmail program merely reads mail from the remote mail servers and puts it in your local incoming mail file (usually a file with your user name in '/var/spool/mail'. Then any linux mail reading program can access it, e.g. 'pine', 'elm' or even the very primitive and ancient 'mail' program (not really recommended, except as a last resort.)

This accords with the general unix/linux philosophy of not forcing you to use large multifunctional tools and instead providing smaller special-purpose tools that can work together and which can be combined into large multifunctional tools in different ways.

Note on using HTML in email

For information on why you should turn off the default of sending email in HTML (especially the default of sending BOTH plain text and HTML), and information on how to turn it off, please see

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/textmail.html

Alas, it seems that users of the Exchange server are not able to turn it off!

Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham