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Using Electronic Mail

 

Electronic mail, or email, is available to all UIC faculty, staff, and students for free. Besides class work, email is widely used to communicate with acquaintances both on and off campus.

Like all ACCC services, using email is a privilege, not a right; there are general etiquette and UIC rules for the proper use of email.

  
   
 
     
What Do I Need?
 
  1. An email mailbox (for example, an account on tigger, icarus, or mailserv, and the password for that account)
  2. An email address (for example, adabyron@uic.edu)
  3. An email handling program (for example, Pine, Eudora, or WebMail)
  
     
1. Email Mailbox: Netid and Password
 

A mailbox is an account on a computer that can send and receive email messages. At UIC, students typically receive their email on icarus, while faculty and staff use tigger (an ACCC UNIX server) or mailserv (an ACCC email-only server).

Your icarus, tigger, or mailserv account is identified by your ACCC netid. And, to make sure that each person access only his or her own account on these machines, your account also haves a password that only you know and that can't be easily guessed. It is a good idea to change your password on a regular basis. (Some ACCC systems require you to change your password every month.)

 
     
2. Email Address
  At UIC, email addresses follow the format netid@uic.edu, where netid is the unique network ID assigned to students, faculty, and staff. The domain name alias uic.edu gets resolved into the actual name of the computer hosting the mailbox (for example, icarus.uic.edu, tigger.uic.edu, mailserv.uic.edu, or eecs.uic.edu).

If you have an account on tigger, icarus, or mailserv, you already have an email address.

 
     
3. Email Handling Program(s)
 

WebMail is the simplest of the ACCC email programs. Everything is done through a Web browser. You don't need to install or configure anything, just point your browser and go.

Pine is a text-based email program available on icarus and tigger. It has lots of features for managing multiple notebooks, address books, and so on. It's fairly easy to learn, but uses text-based menus and doesn't do graphics.

Eudora has a graphical user interface and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh personal computers. It is full-featured and it's good at handling lots of mail.

 
     
Using WebMail
 

Click here to use WebMail

Yes, it's that simple. If you know your netid and password, and which machine your mail goes to (icarus, tigger, or mailserv), just click the above link and read your mail.

For more information on WebMail, see:

 
     
Using Pine
 

To use Pine to read your tigger email, first login to tigger using telnet. Or, if your email account is on icarus, login in icarus using telnet. Pine isn't available on mailserv. (You can't login to mailserv anyway.)

Once logged in, enter the command: pine

Note that the amount of disk space you can use is limited. Mail users should delete unwanted messages from their mailboxes to conserve space.

For more information on Pine, see:

 
     
Using Eudora
  Eudora is a versatile and elegant email program, but it is meant for use by people on their own personal computers.

Eudora is included in the NSKit for Windows and Macintosh, is available through ACCC Server Services, and is available for download directly from the ACCC FTP File Server.

For more information on Eudora, see:

 

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