An E-mail Primer (for faculty/staff)


Last page update: Oct 26, 2001
 
 

Background

This is primer uses and revises parts of a more extensive e-mail advice page which I first posted several years ago, but which I have not updated since June 2000. This new document was written after Hunter's ICIT rushed in drastic changes in e-mail service without proper planning and consultation in October 2001 -- at the order of the Hunter President/Provost. While changes (in particular, a hardware upgrade) have been long overdue and while most computer-savvy users see immediate improvements, many users are left wondering what they should do now, especially those who have relied on telnet/Pine access (which is no longer available on the new e-mail server).

This primer tries to explain the basic choices in non-technical language -- to the extent possible. At times, "technical correctness" is sacrificed for providing a "conceptual explanation". Also, this is not a "How to do" document providing step-by-step instructions, visit the ICIT "cutover" web pages for such instructions, in particular the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section there. Also, the previous advice page contains more of such information and most of it is still useful.

Finally, as of late October 2001, only faculty and staff e-mail accounts have been moved to a new server. As far as Hunter e-mail service is concerned, the discussion below assumes that you have access to the new server and related services. Students account will be moved to a new server at a later point in time, but details have not yet been announced.

Table of Contents

E-mail account providers

As a member of the Hunter community, everyone receives an e-mail account for free and mostly without even asking. At times, there may be some delays in the generation of accounts for new students and part-time faculty, but e-mail accounts are available to anyone. In case, you did not know, find out the details about your Hunter e-mail account. Unfortunately, this page does not work very well (e.g., according to this lookup page I do not have an account at Hunter). ICIT has promised an improved account lookup page which is supposed to provide both your "user name" (like "mkuechle") and the the exact form of your "alias" (like "Manfred.Kuechler"), but the time from promise to reality is often quite long. In any case, you should use one the following formats as your Hunter e-mail address: In addition, virtually all ISPs provide at least one e-mail account as part of their basic package. Finally, there are many organizations that offer free web based e-mail accounts. These include Hotmail, BigFoot, Juno (they also offer free Internet access), and many more. To make matters somewhat confusing, even Eudora now offers free lifetime web e-mail accounts as does Netscape. Since you don't pay, these sites make their money with advertisements. So you get a lot of it on the web page that you need to access to get to your e-mail. However, they usually refrain from sending you advertisements as mail messages (junk, "spam"). These free e-mail accounts are worthwhile considering as backup and/or for getting separate accounts for family members. So, we can distinguish three types of e-mail account providers: Bottom line: No problem to get as many e-mail accounts as you want -- for free. But there are important differences how conveniently you can manage your e-mail. A little investment in time can pay great dividends .....
 

Type of access

There are three basic types of access and I will describe each type in mostly non technical terms. All three types assume that you have a computer connected to the Internet. This connection to the Internet can be For the following, it does not matter how you are connected to the Internet, whether from home or from school, whether via Hunter or via a commercial ISP.
 

A. Telnet (no longer an option)

Telnet allows you to log in to the central computer (the "mail server") from your home/office computer and use your home/office computer as a terminal for the central computer. With telnet access to a central computer, you can do all sorts of things on this computer and this creates a big security risk. Therefore, no major ISP allows you telnet access and Hunter is only catching up in now disallowing telnet access as well -- a good decision.

Once connected to the central computer ("shiva" or "hejira" at Hunter), users use a specific program (a "mail client") to manage (read and compose messages, sort messages into folders) their e-mail. At Hunter, almost everyone used a program called "Pine" (Program for Internet News & Email) which was installed directly on the central computer. However, there is also a PC-version of Pine. So, if you can't live without Pine, you can install this PC version on your home/office computer. But Pine-PC is simply another "POP client" which you can use in place of Eudora  (see below).
 

B. POP

Here you run the mail management program (the "e-mail client") on your own computer and you let this program handle all the uploads and downloads between your computer and the mail server. POP stands for "Post Office Protocol", a general standard for exchanging mail between a user's home/office computer and the central computer (mail server). When you connect to the mail server via such a program, all new messages are downloaded to your home/office computer; but you decide whether or not to keep a copy of (some of) these messages on the mail server as well. If you do, you can later connect from the "other" computer and download  these messages to this other computer as well. This is very useful for people who split their working time between school and home.

Using this approach, all your messages reside on your own computer and you can work on your mail even when you are not connected to the Internet -- or when the mail server is down. These e-mail clients offer much more convenience than the clunky telnet/Pine approach. Hunter has offered "POP service" for many years and continues to offer this service; no change here. However, several ISPs (most notably AOL) do not offer this kind of access (using some proprietary form of access instead).
The most popular e-mail client of this sort is Eudora, but Netscape Mail (in some versions called "Messenger"), MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Pegasus, and PC-Pine are other alternatives. Hunter has a site license for Eudora, and faculty and staff can get the full version without advertisements (the "paid" version) for both home and office use for free.

C. IMAP

IMAP is a more advanced form of POP. With IMAP you can set up a system of mail folders on the central computer (like with good old telnet/Pine), but you can also download these folders to your home/office computer and synchronize what you have on your home computer and on your office computer with what you have on the central computer. So, you can set up new folders and/or move messages on your home computer and when you connect to the central computer your mail folders there are updated accordingly. Then when you go to your office computer and connect to the central computer, the office computer is updated accordingly. So, wherever you are you can have access to the same folders and the same messages. Great for people on the go.

All the better "POP clients" (Eudora, MS Outlook, Netscape) can also run in IMAP mode. Until now, Hunter did not offer IMAP server, so you could not use these features. But, now, you can and this is a major improvement. Unfortunately, so far ICIT has offered little assistance to enable faculty to make use of this big improvement in service. Searching the web, you can find easily find what better run IT unit at other colleges and universities offer in term of support (documents) for IMAP, but the trouble is that it is sometimes difficult to tell what would apply to Hunter as well and what are local  specifics (but check the University of Iowa).
 

D. Web Interface (web based "clients")

Increasingly, e-mail service providers (Hunter as well as commercial ISPs) offer a web interface to access your e-mail, so that you don't have to install and configure a specific program (like Eudora) first before you can access and manage your mail. Instead, all you need is a computer connected to the Internet and a web browser (like Netscape or MS Internet Explorer). This way you have access from almost anywhere to all of your mail and -- typically -- an addressbook as well. Of course, you need to remember the web address ("URL") for this web interface.

Hunter started offering web access in the fall of 2000, introducing a commercial product called "Webmail". But this was a suboptimal solution, as Hunter did not offer IMAP at the time. While you could create mail folders with Webmail, these folders were not linked to the folders on the actual mail server. Now, Hunter is using a different web interface, a product called IMP. This product basically works the same way as an IMAP client (like Eudora) on your home/office computer works (as a matter of fact, it is just another IMAP client -- technically speaking). So changes you make via IMP will affect what you see on the central computer the next time you use Eudora (in IMAP mode) and vice versa. So, it is possible to switch back and forth between Eudora access (e.g., as your standard mode of access) and web access (e.g., when you are out of town). Again, a great enhancement, though IMP itself has room for improvement. In particular, the IMP addressbook is very basic and does not allow "nicknames" for groups of people (like all students in a particular class or all members of a committee). Hopefully, it will improve over time.

Currently, some of the free webmail providers have better interfaces and (e.g., Hotmail), but they usually have rather stingy space limitations. So, if you want to keep messages, it is not a good idea to use one of those free accounts as your main e-mail account.
 

Transition Issues

Faculty who have used telnet/Pine need to decide what to use now -- as telnet service is gone. Some have stayed with telnet/Pine out of inertia, others have stayed with telnet/Pine to have all mail folder an addressbook in a central place. IMAP provides a functional equivalent to this aspect of telnet access -- except for the addressbook. There is no provision within IMAP to automatically synchronize addressbooks on home/office computers with a version of the central computer parallel to what is done with the mail folders. But "addressbooks" are fairly simply text files, and as a proxy, a user could send a message to him/herself with the addressbook as an attachment and keep this message on the central server. This way the addresses would be available from everywhere -- though not quite as conveniently as in an "addressbook" (with

Looking forward, previous telnet/pine users can use either IMP (web interface) or Eudora, etc. under IMAP to have the same functionality as a before -- with much more user comfort (after the pain of change has been overcome). Previous Eudora, etc. users can simply stay with what they had done (POP) or "upgrade" the IMAP -- if it important to them to have all mail folders in a central place as well. In this sense, nobody loses, everyone gains.

An unresolved issue is the migration of existing mail folders generated under Pine. A conversion of Pine mailboxes and the addressbook to Eudora is simple and there are a number of (free) conversion routines available. But can these folders also be converted to IMAP folders and migrated to the new server? Probably, but this may take some effort. Unfortunately, ICIT has not provided any answers though repeatedly pressured to address this issue.
 

Multiple e-mail accounts: Automatic Forwarding v. Multiple Personalities

If you have Internet connection from home, you will have more than one e-mail account. Of course, you can decide to use just one -- and maybe ignore your Hunter account. On the other hand, it is always good to have backup. At minimum, you should set your Hunter account to automatic forwarding. While this was quite a bit of a pain in the past, ICIT now offers a convenient web form to do this -- though the wording on this web form could still use some improvement.

The alternative is to use Eudora and define different "personalities" -- one for each e-mail account you have -- and let Eudora check all accounts automatically for you. So, no matter where a message for you arrives, at your Hunter address or any other e-mail account which allows "POP access" (see above), Eudora collects them all for you. When sending messages, you can select under which personality you want to send a message. And if one e-mail server does not work (cannot be reached) you simply use the other one. You can do the same with MS Outlook/Outlook Express 5 (except, there, you establish "multiple accounts and identities").
 

Bottom Line

The actual changes to e-mail service at Hunter constitute a major improvement. While communication about the upcoming changes left much to be desired and while many of the glitches in the actual transition (missing new accounts, unrequested resetting of PW, insufficient support, etc.) could have easily been avoided by better planning and better advance communication, the end result will be positive. Some people (like me) are experiencing the improvements already; hopefully, everybody else will experience them shortly.

Manfred Kuechler
Hunter College