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You should give your address to others as:
youruserid@essc.psu.edu
You should never include a hostname in your email address. Your email will be available from any ECF workstation.
While an address like "youruserid@essc" will work from most places on campus, it is best to give an email address in such a way that anyone with Internet access can mail to you (e.g. youruserid@essc.psu.edu). You never know when a fellow Penn Stater will pass along your email to a job contact or colleage at another institution.
If you send mail from an ECF workstation, your mail will automatically have a correct return address on it.
Often times, you will receive a file that has been encoded to prevent the loss of format during travel through the Internet. If, when you receive this file, your mail program does not automatically convert the file back into its original state, it would be up to you to convert it manually.
Before you can decode a file, you must figure out what type of file it is. This is fairly simple.
If the file begins with a line similar to:
begin 666 filename.DOC
...then it is of type uuencode.
If the file is preceded by a line that looks like:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
...then it is a mime type file.
If the file is preceded by the line:
(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
...then it is a BinHex file.
You should then save the mail to a file and then delete all lines above the encodedfile. For uuencoded and binhex files, that means delete all lines above the "begin" line or the "(This file must be converted..." line. For a mime file, remove all lines above the "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" line.You should now have a file with only the encoded message in it - lets call it "file.enc"
Use the command:
uudecode file.enc
A file with the same name as was found on the begin line will be created in your current directory. For example, given the "begin" line above, you would have the decoded file "filename.DOC" in your directory.
Use the command:
hexbin file.enc
Usually, the output filename will be file.data. "hexbin -H" will give you a brief help message on program usage.
Use the command:
mimencode -u file.enc > newfile
The decoded will will appear in the current directory with the name "newfile".
If you don't log in to your Sun account frequently, you'll want to forward your email to another address that you check regularly. It's important that the system administrators can contact you quickly via email in case there's a problem with your account.
Email delivery can be controlled by a ".forward" file in your home directory on the Suns. If this file doesn't exist, email is delivered locally to your ECF account, and will stay there until you download or delete it using one of the email programs on the Suns such as mutt, elm, Eudora or Netscape.
If the .forward file does exist, any email that is received for your account will automatically get delivered to the email address listed in that file. The file should contain only a single line that consists of the full email address that should receive all mail sent to yourid@essc.psu.edu.
Note that the .forward file is only checked at the time when a new email is received for you; old emails that were stored before you created the .forward file will remain on the system until you delete them, and as soon as you remove the .forward file, mail will begin to be delivered locally again.
If the computer you're using to check email isn't directly connected to a Penn State network, you won't be able to send email to people whose address doesn't end with "psu.edu". You may see a message along the lines of "we don't relay". This is so that external servers can't use our mail servers to relay spam.
To solve this problem you can either check your email by logging into one of the Suns using ssh and using a console-based email program, or by setting your SMTP server to the one given by your service provider. For example, this problem may arise when you're using someone's AOL account to connect to the internet, and you then set the email settings to:
POP3 server: pop3server.essc.psu.edu SMTP server: smtp.essc.psu.eduInstead, don't change the SMTP server from its original AOL setting; otherwise smtp.essc.psu.edu simply sees a machine with an AOL address trying to send email to someone outside of Penn State, and will refuse to cooperate.