The eMail System

The email system in general is a high-priority system. If you experience a problem with email (assuming we have not notified users that the problem is a long term one) please send a test message to yourself. If you get it, obviously you are able to recieve any email that enters the Math department. Please report mail problems (NOT BY EMAIL) to the Math CSRs, 364 TMCB, 422-7936, or to Jim Logan, 422-6551.

Please try to make a distinction between problems getting/sending mail (ie, the entire system), and problems with your particular mail reader.

One other thing about mail problems is that many "mail problems" can be caused by broken .forward files. IF YOU ARE USING ONE, please check its operation before reporting a problem with email. REALLY!

Occasionally, you may get a bounce or a warning message. A warning message is a message warning you that the site you are trying to mail to either does not have its mail system currently working, or is disconnected from the Internet. The warning message DOES NOT mean that your message will not be delivered, it is simply a warning that your email has not arrived as soon as you expected it to. If email cannot be delivered for an extended period of time (usually 4 days) you will recieve a subsequent bounce message.

Bounce messages mean that your message was undeliverable. This can be caused by many reasons. The bounce message will always give you a reason why; please read the message carefully to see why the message was bounced, and from which system.

How to use email:

Your email address is your username, followed by @math.byu.edu.

There are many mail-reader programs (assuming anyone ever sends you email!), including mail, mailx, pine, dtmail, ml, and of course, EMACS (rmail).

Occasionally, you may get "junk email", meaning unsolicited commercial email. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about it, but if you complain to the postmaster, we will support you. postmaster@ is an address that is required to be a valid address to a human operator on any mail system. PLEASE READ all the headers of the email message you got, because not only may the message's origin be forged, but also the headers (some mail programs interfere with your ability to read headers) may also indicate how the person got your email address, or what kind of automatic system sent you the message or may be waiting to automatically respond to your email, if you send mail back to the sender. If you would like to put an automatic filter on your email system, you might want to read about the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers or the Net Abuse FAQ. If you would like to filter your email (again, please use caution) you may read about Procmail. Here is a sample procmailrc file, though you might want to figure out what it does and how to install it...