Mail Setup

1. Mail Setup for SIT mail accounts
2. General information
3. Types of mail accounts
1. ugrad account
2. non-ugrad account
3. UniKey/extro account
4. Mail forwarding
1. Mailforwarding while keeping your local inbox
5. Spam blocking
6. Mail-borne viruses
7. Remote access to your School mail account
1. Using SSH to tunnel mail access within School
2. Using SIMAP to access your mailboxes from outside the University
8. USyd Mail Address Directory
1. Support

General information

The School firewall allows mail retrieval with standard mail clients using pop or imap from machines within the University's network, and for staff accounts also supports simap from machines outside. To access your mail from outside the University's network you can either tunnel the connection through ssh as described further down this page, use the secure imap protocol if you have a staff account and your email client supports that protocol, or use the web-based mail client at https://www-mail.usyd.edu.au. On the login page choose "imap.cs.usyd.edu.au" or "imap.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au", respectively, to login to the School mail server of your choice. If you are unsure which server to select see below. You can also elect to use the web-based mail client from inside the School's network at http://www-mail.usyd.edu.au. Please note that this webmail interface is maintained by tthe University's ICT service.

Types of mail accounts

See MastersCourseworkAccounts for general information about the accounts allocated to Masters coursework students.

ugrad account

For a given username "user", the resulting mail address is "user@ug.it.usyd.edu.au". Please do not include any machine names in the mail address. The mail is received and sent by our undergraduate mail server mail.ug.it.usyd.edu.au which is the address to use for pop3, imap and smtp settings in your mail client software which you can use within the University network (including modem pool and colleges) to access your mail.

From outside the University you need to use the webmail interface as described in the next paragraph. The University's web mail interface is at https://www-mail.usyd.edu.au. To connect to the ugrad mail server, choose "imap.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au" from the popup menu on the login page. Please note that this webmail interface is maintained by tthe University's ICT service.

non-ugrad account

For a given username "user", the resulting mail address is "user@it.usyd.edu.au". Please do not include any machine server names in the mail address. pop.it.usyd.edu.au, imap.it.usyd.edu.au and smtp.it.usyd.edu.au are the addresses to use for (respectively) pop3, imap and smtp settings in your mail client software which you can use within the University network (including modem pool and colleges) to access your mail. As for simap please refer to the instructions further down this page.

From outside the University you need to use one of the techniques described under "Remote access to your School mail account" further down, or the webmail interface as described here. The University's web mail interface is at https://www-mail.usyd.edu.au/horde/imp/. To connect to the non-ugrad mail server, choose "imap.it.usyd.edu.au" from the drop-down list on the login page. Please note that this webmail interface is maintained by the University's ICT service.

If you have both a ugrad and a non-ugrad account it might make sense for you to forward your mail from one of them so that you can collect all mails from one account. Please see "mail forwarding" further down the page on how to do this.

UniKey/extro account

The UniKey/extro email address (@mail.usyd.edu.au) provided by the University of Sydney is separate from the ugrad and non-ugrad email addresses supported by the School, even though the login names may be the same across all three accounts. All University users should ensure that they monitor or forward this mail account, in addition to any other accounts held within the University.

Mail to the extro email address is scanned/filtered by the central email virus scanner as described here: http://www.usyd.edu.au/is/comms/emailav/

Mail forwarding

In case you wish to forward your mail, for example, from your ugrad account to your non-ugrad account, or from any School accounts to another account (such as mail.usyd.edu.au you can use the mailforward command to do so. The command has to be run from a machine where your mail spool file is accessible as /usr/spool/mail/$LOGNAME. If in doubt, run the command from mail.it.usyd.edu.au or mail.ug.it.usyd.edu.au as appropriate.

The command can be used in three ways.

• to check for forwarding address

mailforward

entered at the unix command line of your MailServer will tell you the mail address mail is forwarded to, if any.

• to setup mail forwarding

mailforward -a user@domain.name

entered at the unix command line of your MailServer will cause the mail server to forward all incoming mail for you to the given address. Please note that this command will only work if there is no current mail for you on the server, i.e. you will have to retrieve and delete all mail from your account first.

• to cancel mail forwarding

mailforward -N

entered at the unix command line of your mail server will cancel mail forwarding and cause the mail server to collect mail to your account for you.

Forwarding for the Unikey/extro mail accounts can be altered from this web forwarding page.

Mailforwarding while keeping your local inbox

#!/gnu/usr/bin/bash 
 
## Edit the FORWARD_TO and LOGIN parameters 
## to match the address to forward to and your 
## School login name, respectively 
 
# Address to forward message to 
 
FORWARD_TO=your@name.here 
 
# Your login name 
 
LOGIN=my_login 
 
## From here it's all generic 
 
# Collect args from postie 
 
FROM_LINE="$1" 
 
# Files to manipulate 
 
SAVE_FILE=/usr/spool/mail/$LOGIN 
TEMP_FILE=/tmp/postie-${2}.$$ 
 
# Collect message 
 
echo "$FROM_LINE" >$TEMP_FILE 
cat >>$TEMP_FILE 
 
# Forward message unchanged (use some other program if 
# other behaviour desired) 
 
/usr/local/bin/netfile -Amailer -NForwardedMail -inrsu "$FORWARD_TO" <$TEMP_FILE 
 
# Save a copy locally 
 
/local/usr/bin/maillock $SAVE_FILE "cat $TEMP_FILE >> $SAVE_FILE" 
 
# Clean-up 
 
rm -f "$TEMP_FILE" 

You can download that code by alt-clicking here

Spam blocking

The School's mail receiver discourages spam via Greylisting.

We offer SpamAssassin spam detection and tagging using white-lists, real-time black-lists, Bayesian keyword analysis and more. Can also be configured to use challenge-response similar to "WhiteList" for mails which look like spam. See SpamAssassin for further information.

Some mail clients also offer client-side spam filtering.

• Eudora for example has a "Junk Mail" feature described at EudoraJunkMail.
• MicrosoftOutlook2003

Mail-borne viruses

Occasionally you will receive mail that contains the code for a virus. Advice on how to deal with such mail may be found at CERT.

Remote access to your School mail account

Using SSH to tunnel mail access within School

See http://vmsbox.cjb.net/PuTTY/ or http://www.cs.dal.ca/studentservices/faq/technical_services/e-mail/portfw.php for details on how to do this from Windows, and below is an example that will work from a Unix host - run the following from a terminal window:

ssh -x -L 8465:smtp.cs.usyd.edu.au:25 -L 8143:imap.cs.usyd.edu.au:143 cpu0 

and then use localhost:8465 for SMTP traffic, and localhost:8143 for IMAP4 traffic.

Mac users can use a utility called "AlmostVPN" (available from the Mac-software repository) to easily setup and use tunnels.

Using SIMAP to access your mailboxes from outside the University

USyd Mail Address Directory

 Hostname: directory-public.usyd.edu.au 
 Base DN: ou=people,o=University of Sydney,c=au 
 Port no: 389 (this is the default) 
 Bind DN: not required.