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.
Follow instructions
to switch your email now!
Using webmail on pangea
Last revision September 21, 2005
Pangea offers a way to read and send email from a web browser,
commonly called "webmail". You invoke this program at the address:
http://pangea.stanford.edu/mail
You must login with your pangea account name and
pangea local password,
not
your SUNet password.
Don't forget to click on the
Sign Out
button when you are done to properly close your session.
Connection is made by SSL, which encrypts your password and data.
"Cookies" must be enabled on your web browser.
Pangea's webmail system is based on the
SquirrelMail
open-source web mail client.
SquirrelMail
is a full featured web-based email reader that is usable
as a primary mail program.
SquirrelMail
is reasonably fast, but like all web-based systems,
it will slow down if you keep large numbers of messages in your
INBOX
or a saved mail folder. In testing, it worked well on a folder
with 500 messages, although it slowed down when told to show all
500 at once on the message index page.
SquirrelMail
has complete on-line help built-in, so click the
Help
link if you have any questions. This help system is context-sensitive:
it will show you help for the page you are on, plus a table of contents
for other topics. Browsing the help is highly recommended the first
time you use this program.
SquirrelMail
uses the IMAP protocol, so it can work with multiple folders.
Email folders are stored in the
Mail
subdirectory of your pangea home directory. This is the same
location used by the
pine
email program on pangea and the same
location used by
IMAP connections from PC or Mac email programs
such as Eudora, Outlook, MacOS X Mail, Netscape Mail, etc.
Thus, you can switch back and forth between those programs and
SquirrelMail
and see all the same mail folders from each.
But don't use SquirrelMail and
pine
simultaneously, or it may kill your
pine
session!
For efficiency reasons,
to access any folder other than the default
INBOX
from
SquirrelMail,
you must first "subscribe" to that folder. Click on the
Folders
link to see the list of all folders you already have created
(possibly from
pine
or an IMAP PC/Mac client).
You can click buttons to either subscribe or unsubscribe
from those folders. You can also create new folders
to organize your mail, and those will in turn be visible to
pine
or IMAP PC/Mac clients. On pangea, folders can contain only messages
or only subfolders. You cannot mix messages and subfolders in
a single folder.
You can receive or send email attachments with
SquirrelMail.
Outgoing attachments may not be larger than 5 Megabytes each.
If you need to work with large
attachments, you should probably use a PC/Mac mail program.
pine
can also handle attachments of any size, up to the limits
imposed by the mail relays (50 MB for pangea, possibly less for
others).
There is a full text search function in
SquirrelMail,
so you can find any email according to keywords or sender or recipient, etc.
You can also set numerous identity and display options. For example,
you can completely customize which fields are displayed in which
column in the message index view, and how messages are sorted.
SquirrelMail
will maintain an address book for you.
You can import the address book from many other programs.
See the
Options
tab.
But you cannot export your
SquirrelMail
address book.
Our version of
SquirrelMail
now has a filter function, accessed from the
Options
tab.
This could be used, for example, to filter
all messages from a particular correspondent into a separate folder.
It could also be used to filter messages flagged as "SPAM" by the
anti-spam checker
on pangea and dump them into a separate folder to be checked and deleted
occasionally, but it is more efficient to use the new
Spam Deletion
feature of the
pangea account maintenance web server
to eliminate spam before it even gets to your email
INBOX.
