Department of Physics and Astronomy - Computer Facilities
Unix Environment for Physics - Programs

E-mail at the Department of Physics and Astronomy

Only computer system supporting electronic mail at our Department is main Sun UNIX cluster. We suggest that everybody should have an account on it. You may also use electronic mail supported by RUCS on "eden" and "rci" systems. However, those are not under our jurisdiction.

Simply enough, your e-mail address on our system would be username@physics.rutgers.edu (for user "joe" it would be: joe@physics.rutgers.edu). When attempting to read mail you will be asked for a password. It is the same password as the one you use for logging into Sun system. Two machines serve our e-mail. It is important for users to know their names and functions in order to properly configure their e-mail processing programs.

pop.physics.rutgers.edu is the incoming ("pop") mail server. User e-mail program needs to contact this machine to receive mail.
smtp.physics.rutgers.edu is the outgoing ("smtp") mail server. User e-mail program will contact this machine to send mail.
imap.physics.rutgers.edu is incoming mail server of "imap" type. User e-mail program will both contact this server to get mail and will store messages here to be retrived from various user locations.
webmail.physics.rutgers.edu this is "webmail" server. You would type this address to access your mail directly from any Internet Browser. Please notice that any other e-mail reader must be closed for webmail to work properly!

Electronic mail programs available and widely used on Sun cluster are Netscape Mail and Pine. Program Zmail is also available, although very few people in the Department use it. We discourage use of rmail and CDE mailtool is intentionally disabled as a security risk (mailtool icon in CDE still points to it, however it is not working).

To configure Netscape Mail with POP server start Netscape and go to the following menus:
Edit -> Preferences -> Mail&Newsgroups -> Identity
Enter your name and e-mail address (username@physics.rutgers.edu, with your "username"). Program will "complain" if you don't enter this information. Remaining info is optional. Than, go to the menu:
Edit -> Preferences -> Mail&Newsgroups -> Mail Servers Highlight (click on) whichever server is present in the "Incoming Mail" window (by default it should be just "pop"). Click on "EDIT" button next to it. (If no default option is present, just click on "ADD" button and continue as follows). In newly open menu enter pop.physics.rutgers.edu as server name and your username in the proper box. Server type is "POP". Other options are up to your choice. There is a "POP" tab in this menu. We require that you DO NOT check the option "Leave Messages on the Server" under this tab as this will cause quick "pile-up" of old messages in /var directory on our system, affecting badly not only one user but everybody. Press "OK" and you are done. All other options are up to your choice.
Please use "Help" menu in Netscape for additional details about its use.

To learn more about IMAP please read following theoretical article

You may also learn how to convert your Netscape Mail from POP to IMAP, and details on IMAP setup.

To configure PINE start it and:
Type "S" for setup.
Type "C" for configure.

You will be presented with a list of options. Set:

user-domain = pop.physics.rutgers.edu
smtp-server = smtp.physics.rutgers.edu

Follow instructions to exit and save configuration.
You may find additional instructional resources about PINE from links posted on our Introduction to Unix page.

Finally, one important part of e-mail setup is "defence from the spam". One possible way to deal with it from Netscape and Mozilla mail programs is to use "Spamassassin" filter. We have a webpage that will help you set these programs to use "Spamassasin" if you wish to do so.


Richard Vaughn
Last modified: Wed Mar 29 12:10:09 EDT 2006