Mail delivery and storage

Mail delivery

In our environment, each electronic mail message is sent to a mailbox on a particular machine. When you get your first accounts, your mailbox is usually created on one of several dedicated hosts located in secure areas. SCS Computer Operations staff monitors these machines, which are thus nearly always available for use. Note: Mail forwarding is done differently here than in many places; read more about how it works.

Because of the special status of these computers, the Facilities staff recommends that you keep your mailbox on such a computer rather than on your workstation to ensure that your electronic mail will always be delivered properly.

Location of your mailbox

Your mailbox is a system file, /usr/spool/mail/$USER, on your mailbox machine. To find out which computer is your mailbox machine, use the finger command:

% finger bovik@cs
[ Forwarding bovik as "bovik+@ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu" ]

After this line comes the plan file, but all you need is this first line. Anytime someone sends mail to Harry, the message is appended to the file /usr/spool/mail/bovik on the computer ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu. To put it another way, Harry's mailbox is on ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu.

Reading mail remotely

In general, you will not log in to your maildrop machine to read your mail, but will read your mail from your workstation.

On vendor-supplied Unix systems: use KPOP

If you are running a vendor-supplied Unix system, you most likely have your mailbox on a general purpose machine. To read your mail from your local machine, put the following line in your .mh_profile:

inc:-host mailhost

Example:

inc:-host ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu

Where to store your mail

If you do not read your mail on your mailbox machine, you should think about where you want your mail to be stored. If you have your own workstation and you use it almost exclusively, you may want to store your mail on it. However if that machine is down for any length of time, your mail may get delayed.

If you use many different machines and want to read mail on each of them, we recommend you have a central storage location for your messages. Otherwise, each time you read new mail, it will be stored on the machine you are using. You could thus end up with portions of your mail stored on different machines, making mail access both difficult and confusing. Of course, your AFS storage area is limited, and you must consider your storage space needs when deciding where to store your mail.

Specifying an MH mail directory in AFS

If you have used any MH command, your home directory will contain a file called .mh_profile. That file contains the following line:

Path: Mail

To store your mail in your AFS directory, change this line to specify some directory under your AFS directory. For example, Harry Bovik might use the following line:

Path:/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/bovik/MH-mail

After you make this change on any machine where you want to read your mail, MH commands will look in your AFS area for your mail, and any new mail you retrieve with inc will be stored in AFS. Note: If you store your mail on AFS, the rmm command will not delete your messages; you must create a script to delete the messages.