Email

Your CS Email Address

Your email address here in the CS department is your login name followed by @cs.brown.edu

SSL Password

For accessing the secure mail services, you will have to create an "SSL password" that is different than your standard unix password. To do so, login in to any of the Department's unix workstations, and run sslpasswd. The password you pick here is the one you'll use for accessing secure pop, secure imap, secure smtp relaying, and web mail.

Mail Readers

There are a large number of mail readers that support pop, imap, and smtp. You're free to choose which ever program you like. Popular mail programs include mutt, pine, netscape, mozilla, and outlook.

The CS Wiki has information on mailbox formats, uw-imap and dovecot.

Detailed instructions for some of the most commonly used clients:

Mozilla Thunderbird
The Mozilla Suite (deprecated)
Outlook

Reading Email via the Web

You can use any web browser to read your mail. This is not meant to be a replacement for your normal mail client, but it's nice when you're traveling and a web browser is all you've got. The URL for webmail is https://webmail.cs.brown.edu. Use your SSL password to login.

AntiVirus

All incoming/outgoing email is run through Clam AntiVirus, a program that scans email messages for known virus signatures and banned content. See the section on virus scanning for more information on our antivirus setup.

Spam

All incoming mail is run through SpamAssassin, a program that tags each message it thinks is spam. You can use this later to help filter spam out of your inbox. See the section on filtering. Should you wish not to have your mail run through SpamAssassin, you can opt out by creating an empty file in your home directory, like so (on unix):

     touch ~/.spam

In addition, our mail relay servers implement a greylisting mechanism. When we initially installed this system, it reduce our incoming spam by approximately 85%! You can read more about our setup.

Automatic Reply

If you're not going to respond to your email for a while, you can use vacation to set up an automatic reply. This lets people know you're not just ignoring them.

Forwarding

If you would like to have email you receive here sent elsewhere, you can set up forwarding.

Mailing Lists

The Department runs its own email discussion lists. To request a discussion list, send an email message to listadmin@cs.brown.edu.