Mail to you is normally delivered to your inbox, where it can be read through IMAP, through webmail, or with a number of mail programs on the application servers such as alpine or mutt. On CSLab's application servers, your inbox is also accessible as /var/mail/your_login_name.
In addition, all mail to you for at least the past fourteen days is always copied to your oldmail, a shadow, read-only mailbox. Your oldmail can only be read from CSLab's core servers; it is not currently accessible through IMAP or webmail. How to access it is described here.
To start a vacation autoreply, run
vacationmessage startTo stop your vacation autoreplies, run
vacationmessage stopIf you want to customize the message that people who write you will get, edit the file .vacation.msg in your CSLab home directory. People who email you several times will only get one autoreply a week, and no autoreplies will be sent for messages that the system thinks are spam.
(Stopping vacation autoreplies doesn't change or remove your vacation message, it just stops it being sent out, so you can use it later. If you customized your vacation message for a particular absence, don't forget to update it the next time you turn on your autoreply.)
The recommended way to forward your mail elsewhere is to put the email address that you want to forward to in the file .forward-nonspam in your home directory. This will forward all non-spam email to the email address (or addresses) in the file; email tagged as spam will be quietly discarded (although all email, spam and non-spam, will continue to be copied to your oldmail). For example, if you wanted to forward your mail to My.Name@somewhere.ca, you would have a .forward-nonspam file that contained:
My.Name@somewhere.caIf you wanted to also forward it to your UTORMail account, the file should contain:
My.Name@somewhere.ca My.Name@utoronto.ca
An important caution: whenever you set up or change your forwarding, you should send yourself a test message to make sure that everything is working correctly.
If you want to forward all your email, including spam-tagged email, put the email address that you want to forward to in the file .forward in your home directory instead.
If you are a student, you should be aware that email forwarding falls under the university's Policy on Official Correspondence with Students, which states that:Students have the right to forward their University-issued electronic mail account to another electronic mail service provider address but remain responsible for ensuring that all University electronic message communication sent to the official University-issued account is received and read.
Note also that email forwarded to external email providers (such as Hotmail, Sympatico, or Yahoo) will be subject to their spam-filtering procedures. These providers vary in their attempts to reduce spam: some are so aggressive in their efforts that they may too frequently misidentify as spam legitimate email forwarded from university accounts. Because of this, please recognize that not all the legitimate email sent to your CS account may make it to your mailbox at the external provider.
If all the filtering you want to do is discard all of the messages to you that are tagged as spam or viruses, just create a .forward-nonspam file that contains:
your_login_name(Change your_login_name to whatever your Unix login is.)
This will deliver all non-spam email to you as normal, and discard all of your spam mail.
CSLab lets anyone create simple mailing lists; you can read about how to do this here.
If you have both a .forward-nonspam and a .forward, email that is not tagged as spam is handled by your .forward-nonspam, while email that is tagged as spam is handled by your .forward instead of just being quietly discarded.
Vacation autoreplies don't interfere or change your forwarding, and vice versa; you can have both active at once, and you can start or stop them independently.
(This means that turning on or off your vacation autoreplies does not change your .forward-nonspam or .forward files, or create them. vacationmessage start does create a default .vacation.msg file if you don't already have one.)
As usual on Unix systems, your .forward (and .forward-nonspam) isn't limited to just email addresses; it can be used to, for example, run email through procmail. The details of how this works on CSLab are covered on our email filtering page.