| Department of Planetary Sciences Lunar and Planetary Laboratory |
 | |
LPL Central Computing Systems (LCS) |
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - Mail
|
| Department of Planetary Sciences Lunar and Planetary Laboratory |
| |
LPL Central Computing Systems (LCS) |
How can I achieve optimal LPL email performance?
To maintain optimal LPL email performance, we recommend that users do the following tasks periodically.
This will speed the delivery, opening, reading, and moving of messages.
The easiest approach is to create an IMAP mail folder called inbox_mmddyy and move old messages from the inbox to it.
Another approach is to create several mail folders for various subject areas and move messages from the inbox to them.
You can do this with your email client, or LPL Systems staff can do this for you.
If you use Thunderbird, you can display the size of each message in your inbox and sort the messages by size, as follows:
If you use Mac Mail, you can display the message size in the inbox list, as follows:
To turn the display of message sizes off again, select the same menu item again.
You'll probably find that a handful of messages are responsible for most of your inbox size.
If you want to keep them, create mail folders, and move these messages to the folders;
otherwise, delete them. Then close and reopen your mail client, to compact your inbox.
You can check your inbox size as follows:
For optimal performance, keep your inbox size under 150 MB. LPL Systems will send you an email reminder when your inbox size is > 300 MB.
This will speed the sending of messages.
The best practice is to create an IMAP mail folder called Sent.mmddyy and move old messages from your Sent folder to it.
You can do this with your email client, or LPL Systems staff can do this for you.
You can check your Sent folder size as follows:
For optimal performance, keep your Sent folder size under 200 MB.
This will speed the deleting of messages.
The easiest approach is to click File -> Empty Trash using your mail client.
You can configure modern GUI mail clients to empty trash on exit.
For example, in Thunderbird, click Tools->Account Settings -> Server Settings.
For optimal performance, keep your Trash folder size under 50 MB.
I am on travel and my innkeeper's network is blocking outgoing mail. How can I send mail from my laptop?
Some innkeepers and internet service providers prevent you from sending mail by blocking port 25. If you are on travel and cannot send mail from your laptop, you can configure your email client program to use port 587 for outgoing mail, instead of port 25.
Outlook Express prevents me from opening email with attachments. How do I fix this?
Outlook Express does not allow all attachments to be saved or opened
because it deems them a risk to security. In order to turn this feature
off you should:
login to webmail
click Options (at the top center of the webmail page)
click Folder Preferences
look at the Folder Path field. it should say "mail/".
fill it in, if necessary.
click Submit
click on Folders
(at the center of the screen above the list of inbox messages),
highlight the folder(s) that you wish to view in webmail
(you can highlight several folders at once by holding down the
ctrl button and clicking them, or holding down the shift button to
highlight a contiguous block in the folders list),
click the Subscribe button.
click the "refresh folder list" link at the top center of the Options page.
click INBOX at the top of the tree on the left side of the page to return to your inbox.
Why is my SquirrelMail running slow?
Probably because your Inbox is too big. If your Inbox is larger than 50 MB, webmail will be slow. To see how big your inbox is, ssh to shell and type "ls -l /var/mail/yourusername", where yourusername is your LPL username.
To dramatically improve your webmail performance, use your favorite non-webmail email client (e.g., pine, thunderbird) to create extra IMAP folders and save your Inbox messages to those folders. Once your Inbox is trimmed, keep it small by filing messages to IMAP folders frequently. If you can only use webmail to do create the folders and trim your Inbox, follow these steps:
PIRL users can start filtering spam by going to the
PIRL SpamAssassin page and following the instructions.
Where does my filtered spam go?
The LPL spam filter delivers filtered spam to your mail/probably-spam and
mail/almost-certainly-spam folders. All other messages are delivered to your
inbox as usual. You will probably need to subscribe to these two folders to see them with your mail client program.
In most email client programs (e.g., Thunderbird, Outlook), you'll click File->Subscribe to do this.
For help with this, please send email to sys (LPL Systems Staff) with a subject line of "spam folder config".
Please check your spam folders from time to time to be sure that only spam is being collected there. Each probably-spam folder is purged when it reaches 25 megabytes in size. Each almost-certainly-spam folder is purged when it reaches 10 megabytes in size.
If you are a PIRL user, the destination of your filtered spam depends on how you configured the filter.
How do I prevent the spam filtering of messages from certain senders (create a whitelist)?
If you find messages in your spam folders that should not have been filtered (false positives), you can prevent messages sent from the sender of those messages from being filtered in the future as follows:
ssh to an LPL solaris server
Use your favorite editor (e.g., vi or pico) to edit this file:
/home/yourusername/.spamassassin/user_prefs
and add a "whitelist_from sender-address" line for each address or class of addresses.
Here are a few examples:
whitelist_from myfriend@happy.com
whitelist_from aperson@aserver.adomain.edu
whitelist_from *@acompany.com
whitelist_from dude@*.arizona.edu
whitelist_from *@lpl.arizona.edu
The user_prefs file already has a sample whitelist line, commented-out.
If you do not know how to use a unix editor (e.g., vi or pico) to make that type of change,
send email to sys to request that it be done for you.
How do I tell the LPL spam filter to always tag messages from certain senders as spam (create a blacklist)?
ssh to an LPL solaris server
Use your favorite editor (e.g., vi or pico) to edit this file:
/home/yourusername/.spamassassin/user_prefs
and add a "blacklist_from sender-address" line for each address or class of addresses.
Here are a few examples:
blacklist_from somespammer@spamsite.com
blacklist_from anotherone@spam.domain.edu
blacklist_from *@spamalot.com
If you do not know how to use a unix editor (e.g., vi or pico) to make that type of change,
send email to sys to request that it be done for you.
How do I use LPL WebMail?
LPL WebMail is accessible from a link on the LPL home page. To
obtain more information and login instructions, please click here:
LPL WebMail Home. If you have comments or
problem reports, please send email to sys.
Where does a draft of a reply go when I click "Save Draft" in LPL WebMail?
When you save a draft while composing a message in LPL WebMail, the draft goes
to your drafts folder. You can see your drafts by clicking on the dark blue
rectangular button just above the LPL logo on the left margin of your browser
window. By default, this button is set to "INBOX". Clicking this button will
give you a list of your folders. Select "drafts" from this list to see the
entries that are in your drafts folder. You can then click on a draft to see
its content, then click on "Resume" above the message to resume composing the
draft.
If I lose my network connection while composing a message/reply in LPL WebMail, can I recover my composition?
If you've lost your connection and then click "Save Draft", your draft will be lost after you close the Compose window, since your browser cannot write to your drafts folder, which is stored under your home directory on the mail server.
Therefore, if you lose your modem or internet connection while you are composing a message or a reply:
- Open a text editor window on your local machine.
- Use the mouse to highlight the composed text in the webmail compose window.
- Cut-and-paste that text into the text editor window.
- Save the text editor contents to a file on your local machine.
Regarding the cut-and-paste mechanics:
- On Solaris, use the left button to highlight and the middle button to paste.
- On Windows, this is more difficult, since the webmail Compose/Reply window
has no "edit->cut/copy/paste" menu, but you can cut-and-paste by:
Highlighting the text,
Right-clicking into the text editor window,
Selecting Paste from the pop-up list.
- On MacOS, the cut-and-paste procedure is not yet documented.
Regardless of whether or not this cut-and-paste worked:
- Leave the webmail windows as they are (leave the compose/reply window open).
- Re-establish the network connection.
- Now see whether i can resume the webmail session from where one left off.
Since you haven't logged out of webmail, and the session hasn't had enough time
to timeout, this is sometimes possible. This is one reason why it's very
important to Logout of webmail after each session.
- Click on the main webmail browser window's border.
- Click Back to INBOX.
- Refresh your INBOX.
- Click Compose and send yourself a test message.
- Refresh your INBOX.
- If this works, then click on the Compose window that has your original draft.
Either click Save Draft and check your drafts folder for the saved draft, or simply complete your composition and click Send Message.
- If this doesn't work, return to the LPL WebMail login page and login again. Then recreate your composition, using the copy that was saved in your local text editor window, using cut-and-paste.
How do I install and configure Pine on my Windows PC?
To set up Pine on a Windows PC, perform the following steps.
Windows PC Pine Setup Steps
How do I read Microsoft Word email attachments in UNIX mail?
UNIX LPL WebMail: Click on the message to read it, then click on the
attachment hyperlink (not the diskette or MS Word icons) to view the text
version of the attachment.
UNIX Pine: Read the message, use the V and S commands to save the
attachment to your UNIX home directory, then use the antiword command to
display the saved file in text format (% antiword saved_filename).
UNIX dtmail: Double-click on the message to display it in a window, use
the Attachments pull-down menu on the message window to save the attachment
to a file, then use the antiword command to display the saved file in text
format (% antiword saved_filename).
UNIX mail or mailx command-line: Read the message, use the "s" command to
save the message to your UNIX directory, use munpack to extract/convert the attachment, and use antiword to display it in text format.
For example, if you saved the message to "saved_message", you would type the commands given in blue (command output is in green):
% /opt/sfw/bin/munpack < saved_message
munpack: reading from standard input
Memo_to_Atmospheric_Sciences.do (application/msword)
(text of the MS Word attachment appears)
Accessing antiword: On LPL UNIX machines, the antiword executable is
/opt/lpl/bin/antiword, which is in most people's PATH when they login. If you
cannot invoke antiword from the command line, type "rehash" and try again. If
you still cannot invoke it, edit your ~/.cshrc to add /opt/lpl/bin to your path,
or contact the LCS staff to have your login path updated.
Pine hangs when run after logging in to LPL remotely via SSH from my Apple PC. What's wrong?
Check your TERM environment variable setting in your LPL UNIX terminal window. If it's "ascii", that will cause pine to hang. Set it to "vt100" and restart pine. In csh:
% setenv TERM vt100
% pine
Where do I find information on using mailing lists (Majordomo)?
Please contact the LPL Central Computing Staff if you have any questions.
How do I access archived mailing list messages (Majordomo)?
To read the content of archived messages:
We plan to install majorcool (a web-based command interface for list
maintainers and users) and web-based archive software for reading the
archive. For now, please use the majordomo commands to access the archive.
How do I get a mailing list created (Majordomo)?
To have a mailing list created on the LPL network, please send an email to
sys with a subject of "list create request".
Include the following information in the message body:
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