Email Overview

Email Overview

Overview of Electronic Mail (Email) in Physics and on Campus

Accounts created after Summer of 2004 will have there mail on the centralizedOIT mail server. There will be a default entry causing all mail to Glue or PNCE-Unix systems to be forwarded to the mail@umd account. You will need to contact PCS to assist in removing this if that is desired.

Everyone at Umd also has an email address of the form USERNAME@umd.edu There is no mail storage associated with the umd.edu domain name, it merely redirects your email to another server, possibly with a less user friendly name. This can be altered via the ARES system. If your account is older and you have not migrated to the mail@umd system, you will have an e-mail address USERNAME@physics.umd.edu which will be processed by a dedicated departmental mail server. (Newer accounts and those migrated to the mail server will also have such an address, but it will be redirected to their mail@umd account). E-mail is accessible via pine from the UNIX prompt on any PNCE machine, and in particular from the departmental login machines login.physics.umd.edu.

If you prefer to use a client based e-mail package such as Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox (imap or pop), Outlook(imap or pop); the releveant server names are listed below. Due to our finite resources, Physics Computing Services may not be able to provide user support for problems with clients other than pine, Outlook, or Netscape/Mozilla.

The PNCE operates the following mail servers:

IMAP - imap.physics.umd.edu
SMTP - smtp.physics.umd.edu
POP - pop.physics.umd.edu

SMTP is also listed as "Outgoing mail server" or "Sending email server" or similar in many clients. IMAP and POP are sometimes listing as "Incoming mail server" or "Receiving mail server".

It is generally recommended that people use IMAP over POP where available to read their email, as IMAP has better support for folders and generally leaves the mail on the server. If you do use POP, you should check for a setting to leave the email on the server (many newer POP clients support this). By default, POP downloads the email to the PC you are sitting at whenever you connect (simultaneously deleting it from the server); this has several disadvantages:

Your PC's local disk is probably not backed up, which means your email is not backed up.
If you access your mail from multiple machines (e.g. your office machine, your home machine, and maybe a laptop), the mail will be spread out over all these different machines, with any one machine only having a subset of your mail.

As of January, 2006, you must use an encrypted protocol to access you mail. The encryption means that the password you use to access your email gets encrypted, it does not mean that your email is encrypted, so you should be careful about what information is included in an email, as hackers may be able to read it as it crosses the network from your machine to its destination (in general, you should think of email like a traditional postcard, where anyone who can see it while it is being delivered can read it). For the departmental servers, this means you should set either the IMAP or POP protocol to use encryption (also known as SSL or TLS); if there is an option, set to 'Use always'. As the departmental outgoing mail server does not demand a password to send email, it does not require (and does not accept) encrypted protocols, so do not set encryption for SMTP. : The campus mail@umd.edu system does require passwords for outgoing mail and encryption for outgoing email. Details about setting up email clients to use encryption