Email FAQ

How do I install a spam filter?

Emails received at our mail servers are checked by Spamassassin. Suspected spam is tagged with an additional header which includes a spam score. CIMS users who receive emails locally on our servers can use this additional information to sort spam into separate folders. Our spam-tagged emails have an additional header that looks similar to this:

X-Spam-Score: 6.804 (******) DATE_MISSING,FROM_NO_LOWER,...

If you know how to setup filters on your mailer, you can ask your mailer to sort any mail with the X-Spam-Score: header into a separate folder. If your mailer does not have sorting capabilities, you can follow the instructions here to setup procmail to filter incoming emails for you.

How do I forward my mail?

You can use a .forward file to forward mail to an address outside of Courant. Forwarding mail to another machine at Courant will result in an alias loop due to the existence of your global alias. So beware.

To forward all your mail to an outside address from your CIMS address, simply open the .forward file in your home directory. Modify the file so that it contains only the e-mail address that you would like all your mail to be forwarded to. If you want to disable mail-forwarding, simply delete the file, or leave it completely blank.

How do I set my mail to view European or French characters in Pine?

This is most likely due to pine's lack of UTF-8 character encoding. Setting your terminal to use "Central European" for it's character encoding should fix this. This is different depending on the terminal you're using, however if you're using our default GNOME setup with gnome-terminal you can do this as follows:

  • From gnome-terminal's menu, select select Terminal->Set Character Encoding->Add or Remove.
  • Select Western (ISO-8858-1)from the left menu and click Add.
  • Click Close.
  • From gnome-terminal's menu, select Terminal->Set Character Encoding->Western (ISO-8858-1).
  • If your mail client is open, you will have to close it and reopen it.