The School of Computer Science offers Email accounts for students, faculty and staff. The SCS email service offers:

• web-mail access from anywhere on the internet
• imap access
• 1 GB inbox quota
• spam protection
• SSl/TLS connections to our mail server - this allows to configure your home system to be able to route all outgoing e-mail through SCS servers

You can access your SCS email through one of two web-mail clients.

SCS Web-mail URL

The email server mail.scs.carleton.ca can be accessed using the SSL and the IMAP protocol as well as through one of the school's web-mail clients. A common email application that uses IMAP is Mozilla Thunderbird (available free of charge).

• Server Name: imap.scs.carleton.ca
• Email Protocol: IMAP
• Incoming Username: <your_SCS_linux_account>
• Secure Connection: use SSL protocol (encrypted connection)
• Port: 993

If you are physically located at SCS (on the 134.117.27.XXX subnet)

• Server Name (smtp): mail.scs.carleton.ca
• Outgoing Username: <your_SCS_linux_account>
• Secure Connection: No
• Port: 25

If you are outside of the School of Computer Science (not on subnet 134.117.27.XXX)

• Server Name (smtp): mail.scs.carleton.ca
• Outgoing Username: <your_SCS_linux_account>
• Secure Connection: use SSL protocol
• Port: 465

• Thunderbird Mail Client
• Mac Mail Client
• MS Outlook Mail Client
• Pine Client

• Largest incoming mail size: 75Mb
• Largest outgoing mail size: 75Mb
• Mail Quota: 1 Gb

SCS uses the following spam protection:

• Greylisting ¹⁾
• Spam Assassin

You can enable personal spamassassin settings by adding the following to your homedirectories .procmailrc file:

SHELL=/bin/sh

# Enable personal spamassassin settings:0fw: spamassassin.lock
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* < 256000
| spamassassin

Once you receive your first message a default .spamassassin directory will be generated. There you will find a user_prefs file which you can edit. The file also allows for personal blacklists and whitelists and you can alter the spamassassin-score.

What does Spam Assassin do?

Spamassassin will tag an email as spam in the email header and on the Subject line. The Subject line will have [SPAM ++++++] where the + signs indicate the spam level. Now its up to the user (you) what you want to do with those emails. There are email clients that can identify emails labeled as spam and can remove them.²⁾

You can add a procmail rule that will delete all your personal blacklisted emails. Here are the steps to enable it:

1. Add a .procmailrc file on access/lambda (see code below)
2. Once you receive an email with the procmail code enabled it will generate a file called .spamassassin/user_prefs. Edit this file and add your blacklisted email of the form “blacklist_from somewhere@somesite.com”
3. Check the logfile .spamassassin/procmail.log if your procmail script deleted any messages

Here is the ~/.procmailrc file that can delete blacklisted emails using a combination of spamassassin and procmail filtering:

SHELL=/bin/sh
TRASH=/dev/null
LOGFILE=$HOME/.spamassassin/procmail.log
VERBOSE=no

# Enable personal spamassassin settings
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* < 256000
| spamassassin

# Remove all spamassassin spam scored 50 (blacklisted emails)
:0
* ^Subject:.\[SPAM \+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\
+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\]
$TRASH

You can add this file in your SCS account accessible through access or the lambda linux network.

You can delete all emails above a certain spamassassin score. This is done by adding the following code to your .procmailrc file:

SHELL=/bin/sh
TRASH=/dev/null
LOGFILE=$HOME/.spamassassin/procmail.log
VERBOSE=no

# Enable personal spamassassin settings
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* < 256000
| spamassassin

# Removes all spam higher than level 15
:0
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
$TRASH

You can forward mail by logging into access.scs.carleton.ca and creating .forward file.

The .forward file can have a single forward:

John Doe <jdoe@hotmail.com>

or you can deliver a copy in your inbox plus forward a copy:

/jdoe
John Doe <jdoe@hotmail.com>

You can also create a list of forwards (one entry per line):

John Doe <jdoe@hotmail.com>
Jane Smith <jsmith@gmail.com>
Homer Simpson <hsimpson@yahoo.com>

Make sure your .forward file has perms '-rw-r–r–':

chmod 644 ~/.forward

Do you want to send an auto-reply to who-ever is sending you email? Using procmail you can set up an auto-reply with a vacation message of your choosing. Here's how to set it up:

• Create a .vacation message/file (chmod 644 .vacation)
• Create a .procmailrc file (chmod 644 .procmailrc)

The .vacation file is a plain text file that contains the vacation message that will be sent to the sender.

Here is the .procmailrc file (you can cut and paste it) ³⁾:

# Replace hsimpson with your account name

# This is actually two recipies. This is meant to go at the END of your .procmailrc
# so it doesn't trigger on mailing lists that you're filtering above.

# Will add the sender to the vacation cache if not already in the vacation cache
# FROM_DAEMON is a macro for a lot of "system" addresses. see the
# procmailrc man page fordetails

:0 Whc: vacation.lock
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: hsimpson@scs.carleton.ca
| formail -rD 8192 vacation.cache

# Only run this rule if the last rule didn't match, meaning it will only mail each
# user once.

:0 ehc         # if the name was not in the cache
| (formail -rA"Precedence: junk" \
   -A"X-Loop: hsimpson@scs.carleton.ca" ; \
cat $HOME/.vacation.message; \
echo ""; \
echo "-- "; cat $HOME/.signature \
) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

To disable the vacation message rename the .procmailrc file.

There are two different mail formats:

• mbox - single file that holds many emails
• maildir - directory of separate mail files

The SCS server stores files in maildir format on the server INBOX and can read mbox files on your local account.

Email upgrade and moving mail folders from daVinci