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Email service on pangea ends on Nov 1, 2007.
Information on this page is only valid until that date, for accounts
that have not yet switched to another service.
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Details and Configuration: |
There are three basic choices for reading and sending email with a pangea account: a program named pine that runs from a command-line login to pangea; a PC or Macintosh based program; or a web-based mail reader that runs on pangea. This page briefly describes the advantages and disadvantages of each choice. Click on one of the links to the left, or the header for each section, to get more information and configuration instructions for that email program.
pine and pangea's webmail always access the same "INBOX" and saved mail folder files, so you can alternate between them. PC and Macintosh based programs see the same INBOX file as well, but may remove the messages if using POP so they can no longer be seen by pine and webmail. Using IMAP configuration for PC and Macintosh programs allows them to completely share both the INBOX and saved mail folder files with pine and webmail. But don't run multiple email programs simultaneously to access your pangea mail or you may corrupt messages. Only run them sequentially.
Your INBOX and saved email folder files on pangea are backed up to tape every night (Monday through Friday) and can be recovered if accidentally deleted. Saved email on your local computer is your responsibility to backup.
In addition to interactive mail processing, programs you run on pangea can also send email using the Unix mailx program.
pine
You can login to a command line shell on pangea and run the text-based pine program to process email.
- pine is a simple and fast text-based email program that requires an encrypted login session. All your new and saved email messages are stored on pangea. It is recommended for people using multiple computers on campus that have the necessary login software (either Samson or an ssh client).
- Your local computer will never be infected by email viruses if you read your email with pine. All other options for reading email expose you to the possibility of infection by email viruses. With pine, your mail is handled entirely on pangea, where the design and configuration of Unix makes it impossible for these viruses to run.
- You will find that pine is less adept at handling multimedia messages than webmail or PC or Macintosh based programs. In-line graphics cannot be shown (it is a text-based reader), and attachments and embedded URLs can be cumbersome to handle. To view an attachment, you must go through a two step process of saving it to pangea's disk, and then downloading it to your local computer.
PC or Macintosh program
You can also use a program on a personal computer that downloads email from pangea and sends outgoing messages through pangea, such as Eudora or MacOS X Mail.
- These are not a good choice for computers shared by two or more people. It is difficult to keep your email messages separated and private.
- Email programs for personal computers usually have excellent formatting features, handle inline graphics, and make it easy to send and receive files from other programs (such as word processing documents) as attachments.
- With the standard POP configuration, all your old and saved email messages are stored on the hard drive of your personal computer. If you don't have that personal computer with you, you can't get to those messages. If your hard disk crashes, your saved messages are lost unless you regularly backup your hard drive. However, IMAP service on pangea allows you to keep your saved mail on the server (up to the limit of allowable disk usage).
- A Windows PC is vulnerable to "infection" and corruption by email viruses when you use a personal computer email program. So far, email viruses have not bothered Macintosh systems, but they are theoretically possible there as well. With some email programs such as Microsoft Outlook (or Outlook Express), infection by an email virus can happen even when you don't open the infected message!
- If your personal computer is located off-campus, or is used while traveling, you may find it difficult to send email via pangea due to restrictions on email relaying. Read this note for a description of the problem and what to do about it.
Web-based mail
Pangea offers a Webmail interface for reading and sending email.
- The webmail program on pangea is a full-featured mail reader based on IMAP.
- Recommended for use while traveling, as only a web browser is needed. Robust enough to use as your regular program, but not as efficient as pine or a PC or Macintosh mail program.
- Pangea's webmail is relatively fast and provides full features for sorting and searching your email. Can also set up filters to separate out messages into different folders.
- Using IMAP, webmail can create and use saved message folders on pangea that interoperate with saved message folders created in pine and PC or Macintosh mail programs (that use IMAP).
- Attachments can be sent and received, but are limited in size to no more than five megabytes each. pine and PC or Macintosh based email programs allow attachments of any size up to the mail system limit (currently 50 megabytes on pangea, but may be less on remote systems that relay the message).
- You must accept "cookies" from pangea.stanford.edu in your web browser to access webmail. The secure socket layer (SSL) is used to encrypt your connection so that your password and data are safe from spying by hackers.
