Email @demog.berkeley.edu
If you have a Demography Lab computing account, then you also have a
user@demog.berkeley.edu email address. This is both a good thing and
an irrelevant thing. Because Berkeley supports a rebranded version of
most of the google apps, it is quite compelling to play along. If you
wish to be able to respond to invitations; have things added to your
calendar in easy ways; and so on, then it behooves you to use your
@berkeley.edu address as your main email address.
Your @demog.berkeley.edu address, however, still requires
some attention. Important email from the department including not
only messages warning you of system shutdowns but also notices of
importance to you academic career are also sent to your
@demog.berkeley.edu address.
So at a minimum, make sure that your @demog email gets forwarded to an email address that you actually monitor. See Section 2.
Forwarding your @demog.berkeley.edu email
When you signed up for a Demography Lab account, your email was configured
to forward everything to the existing email address that you provided. If that's still your main email address then you are done. If not, here is how to make it so:
Email forwarding is configured via a file called /mail/CONFIG/forward. This file simply contains the address to which you would like your email forwarded. You can edit with any text editor (vi, emacs, nano,pico.. whatever). Alternatively, you use the locally written gizmo at [Applications][Demography][Email Forwarding].
For most people, that is all there is to it. As long as your read mail at your forwarding address, nothing bad will happen to you. When that changes, update your forward file.
If you are of a certain age, you have been doing your email with your @demog.berkeley.edu address and would probably prefer to continue doing so. We understand. Unfortunately, the world has moved on and unless you are very important, you will need to be able to do the google-y things that the campus now expects you to do. And that means migrating to @berkeley.edu.
Migrating involves the following steps:
- Configuring your @demog email to forward to your @berkeley address. (And possibly turning off the forwarding from your @berkeley address to your @demog address)
- Copying your existing email archive from the Demography Lab server to the bmail server.
Copying your email archive can take hours or even days, but it is not difficult-for you. All you need to do is send email to trouble@demog.berkeley.edu and ask for help.
If for whatever reason, you prefer to read and write email using the tools of our ancestors, then see below. Be aware that as time goes on this way of doing email will eventually become untenable - but so will email itself - so follow your heart.
Instructions for doing email as we did during the first Clinton Administration are below:
If you have a userid at the Demography lab, then your email address is
useriddemog.berkeley.edu.
The simplest way to use that distinctive email address is with the
squirrelmail web interface. Just
browse to http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/sqmail. The web interface
works from any machine with a browser and Internet access. A more efficient
(and nearly as simple) option which is available on all Demography Lab
machines1 is to use alpine. At the Unix
prompt, type:
@: alpine
.
alpine is entirely text based. This can be initially somewhat
jarring, but once you learn a few key combinations your email
efficiency will rise rapidly. Alpine is free and available for mac and
windows, so it can run on your personal computer as well.
For the most part Demography Lab email servers are standard so the
default settings often work. Here are the settings to use when
configuring by hand:
- IMAP is the protocol to use for reading and managing stored
email. Specify the following:
- IMAP server: imap.demog.berkeley.edu
- IMAP port:143
- Security: TLS
- userid: your login id (just the first part NOT the @demog.berkeley.edu)
- SMTP is the protocol to use for sending email. Specify the
following:
- SMTP server: smtp.demog.berkeley.edu
- SMTP port: 2525 (the default 25 also works but is blocked by
many ISPs)
- Security: TLS
- userid: your login id (just the first part NOT the @demog.berkeley.edu)
Note that some email agents will complain that our security
certificate is for a host named www.demog.berkeley.edu rather
than imap.demog.berkeley.edu or
smtp.demog.berkeley.edu. If so, just check the box and move on.
Details
Unfortunately, simplicity is not what email is about anymore. The
existence of evil in the world ensures a steady stream of SPAM,
viruses and phishy messages which must be filtered out and then carefully
ignored. At the same time our need for video, audio
and files in proprietary formats have made individual email messages
much more complicated.
As a consequence, you have a lot of email to deal with and much of it
is unfriendly. We currently support the following features to help
you cope with emails complexities:
- Spam filtering with Baysean learning via spamassassin2
- Virus filtering with ClamAV3
- Decoding of word documents with antiword4
- Fancy email filtering with procmail 5
- Auto responders (implemented locally with procmail)
- forwarding email to alternate addresses
For detailed instructions on how to do all sorts of specific things
with email please read the ``Email'' section of the FAQ
lab.demog.berkeley.edu/Faq/faq/fq.shtml. This page is only
scratches the surface.
Spam filtering
``Spam'' is unsolicited commercial email. While the
vast majority of what we tend to think of as Spam - does fit this
definition, a significant minority does not. Email lists that you
joined but have since lost interest in, messages from vendors that you
carelessly asked to keep you ``informed'' should
be dealt with by following the directions for removing yourself from
the list. Turning off unwanted email from reputable sources
by following their directions is preferable. It makes it easier to
detect real spam.
We use spamassassin to filter spam. Unless you have carelessly
created a file in your mail/CONFIG directory called
deliver-spam
then spamassassin is diverting
spam to a folder called DivertedSpam right now. If you are
missing some mail that you know was sent check the DivertedSpam
folder. It is perfectly fine to delete the DivertedSpam folder
whenver you like - it will not stay gone for long, however.
``Baysean learning'' is easy and satisfying. It will probably halve
the amount of spam that gets through spamassassin's pretty good
filters.
All you need to do for this to happen is
to begin saving your spam in ``folder'' called
SPAM.6
Every night a program will digest your SPAM file (``folder'') and
create a spam filter based on it. The documentation insists that it is
equally important to save false positives - that is email messages
which Spamassassin falsely categorized as spam - into a file
(``folder'') called HAM. Experience seems to indicate that this
is difficult to do because very few legitimate messages ever turn up
in DivertedSpam and not necessary, for pretty much the same
reason. However everyone's spam is a little different so this might
work for you.
You don't need to think about viruses. We filter them so that you
never see them. But watch out for phishing scams particularly if your
personal computer runs MS Windows.
If you have a file in your tilda/mail/CONFIG directory called decodewordmail
then the email server will run any
.doc attachments through antiword (http://www.winfield.demon.nl). If the decoding is successful, then
a plain text version of the attached fill is appended to the
bottom of the text part of the email message. The .doc
attachment is preserved.
The advantage of this is that you don't need to launch a word
processing program to read that 4 line message that some dope sent you
as a .doc file. On the other hand, if the .doc attachment is
200 pages long, you can still read read/print/edit it in a word
processor. Since the text version is at the bottom of the message you
don't risk missing anything if you don't scroll all the way to the end
of it.
You can do very fancy things to your email with
procmail. Filtering mail based on where it comes from, whether
or not certain words are present in the message, how long the message
is, and just about anything you can think of is possible. Further
receipt of certain email messages can trigger other programs to
launch. Much is possible. Some of it is useful. If this sort of
thing appeals to you take a look at:
http://www.perlcode.org/tutorials/procmail/proctut/.
Note that your procmailrc file goes in tilda/mail/CONFIG and does not have a
leading ``.'' as is the convention.
Using procmail you can do much fancier things than simply replying to
all non-virus/spam email with an ``I am vacationing on a planet where
there is no email'' message. But this latter trick is quite useful so
we have made it particularly simple to do. Just type your message in
a file called tilda/mail/CONFIG /vacation_msg. Whatever you put in that file
will be sent in response to any email that you receive while that file
is present.
When you return from your travels, just delete the file to turn off
the message.
See Section 2
Email lists
The Demography Lab maintains several email lists. Generally, you are on
these lists if you belong there, for example if you are a student then
you are probably on the students@demog.berkeley.edu list. You
can send email to these lists only if you do so from an eamil address
that ends in @demog.berkeley.edu.
For information about the email lists such as who is on it (useful if
you are sending a party invitation)
see https://lists.demog.berkeley.edu/cgi/mlist.pl
Email @demog.berkeley.edu
This document was generated using the
LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2008 (1.71)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 -local_icons email
The translation was initiated by Carl Mason on 2016-02-02
Footnotes
- ...
machines1
- alpine is free and easy to install on Linux, Windows
and Mac machines. See the FAQ for details
- ...spamassassin2
- spamassassin.apache.org
- ...ClamAV3
- www.clamAV.net
- ...antiword4
- http://www.winfield.demon.nl
- ... procmail5
- www.procmail.org
- ...SPAM.6
- If you are using pine just hit ``s'' to save and
type SPAM (all upper case) when prompted for the folder into which
you would like to save the message. For other mailers you may need
to do other things. In the end, a file called
/mail/SPAM is what the system looks for.
Carl Mason
2016-02-02