Please see this page.
Please see this page.
Please see this page.
Please see: how to configure your e-mail client.
Do not. Even if that works today, it may stop working tomorrow. Please address mail to local users either in the simple unqualified form username or in the fully qualified form username@math.arizona.edu. Anything else is incorrect. The correct forms should work from any of our systems, whether in your office, in a lab, or in webmail—if not, please contact the support staff.
Please see this intranet page.
They are updated whenever we are informed of changes by the various academic offices.
If you want a private e-mail list (that only you send messages to), simply create your own alias list.
If you want a public e-mail list (that you and others—such as your students—can send messages to), you can ask UITS to set up a LISTSERV for your class.
Certainly. Please see: how to forward your e-mail.
Many mail programs will show the recipient address when the sender address is your own. Your address used to be you@hedgehog.math.arizona.edu, but now it is simply you@math.arizona.edu. Thus your address no longer matches the sender address in old e-mail, and consequently the e-mail software displays the sender address instead of the recipient address. Annoying, eh?
This is very difficult to fix properly, as it requires editing old mailbox files to fix up your sender address. However, some mail programs rely on precomputed content-lengths of messages, so simply editing the file will mess all of that up. Furthermore, you really only want to fix the message sender address, as opposed to all the routing addresses that show up in the extended headers.
The following code just does a brute-force replace. Thus it may mess things up for some e-mail software, and it certainly messes up the extended headers, so it'll be impossible to figure out how an old message got routed through various mail servers. (The latter may not be important to you.) At least the code below makes a backup, so you can try it and see whether you like the results.
cd cp -a mail mail_bkup cd mail perl -pi -e "s/\@hedgehog\.math\.arizona\.edu/\@math\.arizona\.edu/g;" *
You may want to run a similar set of commands on your other mail folders as well. After doing this, open up your saved mail in all the e-mail client programs you rely on (webmail, pine, outlook, eudora, whatever). Make sure you're happy with how things look. (Also click on messages, make sure they show up okay.) Once you're convinced all is well, you could delete the backup copies:
cd rm -r mail_bkup
On the other hand, if you don't like the results, you'll want to put the backups back in place:
cd mv mail_bkup mail
Spam is similar to physical junk mail: to receive less of it, ensure that fewer people out there have your address. Many of us post our e-mail address on websites, and we give out our address freely when asked for it by various websites out there. Many websites require an e-mail address for registration, and those sites in turn may sell your address to others. Here are some steps you can take:
You can contact me at johnNO@SPAMmath.arizona.edu, being sure to remove the "NO SPAM" part of the address.Some people simply use:
You can contact me at the following address: john at math.arizona.edu.Whatever technique you use, if it is popular and has been in use for a while, you can bet that automated robots out there are able to make sense of it. Thus, invent your own technique, and re-invent it periodically if you see that others are using the same technique. (NOTE: As of March 2004, the main math site www.math.arizona.edu does list everyone's e-mail address. We are endeavoring to fix that.)
You have probably seen other departments replacing the @ symbol with a different one, or inserting some words such as "NO SPAM" (see the previous question/answer for more on this), or displaying e-mail addresses as images instead of as text. Since others are doing this, you may think that this is an effective solution to the spam problem, and thus we too should be doing this. Unfortunately, disguising e-mail addresses does not solve the problem. Instead, it impacts legitimate users (who can no longer click on a link, or easily copy/paste an address), forcing them to manually type or manually edit the e-mail address, leading at a minimum to inconvenience but often also leading to mistakes and sometimes even lost messages. (If you send an e-mail to an incorrect yet legitimate address, the receiver may quietly delete the message. You'll get no bounce message. You'll never know the intended recipient did not receive your message. Furthermore, sensitive information may end up in the wrong hands. The situation may appear ridiculously unlikely; yet, it regularly bites members of our own department.
Keep in mind that almost every trick a human can think of to disguise an address in a systematic fashion will be easily defeated by the harvesters (who simply write small computer programs to "undo the trick"). All the standard tricks are quite familiar to the harvesters. Departments that use these tricks merely give their users a false sense of protection. It is a way of deflecting blame. (If you suddenly receive a bunch of spam, and you complain to such a department's system staff, they can deflect, "Well, we've disguised the address, so the spam is not our fault." We don't believe in misleading our users in that fashion.) Actually, the entire question of how to disguise information in such a way that a human can easily see the true information yet no robot can do so is an active area of research in computer science (specifically, artificial intelligence research). To read more about this, search the web on the keyword "CAPTCHA".
If disguising the addresses were the correct approach to the spam problem, we assure you we would take that approach. Another approach, used by some departments, is to not publish e-mail addresses at all; instead, there would be a webform on the department website for sending e-mail to department members. But this prevents people from using their usual e-mail client to send messages. Furthermore, some spammers already recognize such forms, and simply use the forms to send the spam, without ever learning the recipient's e-mail address. So you see, it is a no-win situation.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to significantly reduce the spam problem. Our recommendation is that you make use of an e-mail client that has a built-in "personal junk filter". For example, Mozilla Thunderbird has such a filter, and if you're not already using Thunderbird, our system staff would be happy to help you get started.
Usually the encoding type is specified in the mail headers, so modern mail readers will be able to decode the message automatically. Try looking at the message using Webmail, mutt, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, or pine. The command munpack may be handy. Ultimately, though, you may have to ask the sender how the message was encoded and ask for instructions on decoding it.
This is indeed indication of a virus infection somewhere in the world, but often has absolutely nothing to do with you (nor with our buildings, nor with which operating system you use). Essentially, some computer somewhere is infected, and is sending out e-mails with forged headers stemming from the Address Books on the infected computers. Apparently your address is showing up in the forged header. (Perhaps you once communicated with someone somewhere, and now their computer is infected.) Some of those e-mails can't be delivered and thus get bounced back to the person named in the forged headers, which in this case is you.
We suggest you ignore/delete the bogus messages you're receiving.
