Click on a question to go to the answer.
Q: How do I access my email when I am traveling?
A: The easy way is to use one of the web-based E-mail access systems. Which one you should use depends on where you get your email:
Q: How do I forward all my E-mail from my Purdue mailhub E-mail account to my College of PNHS E-mail account?
A: Go to http://directory.purdue.edu/directory-bin/nph-update.pl. Login using your Purdue University account name and password. Select the "Change service" entry and set it to "forward". Say "OK". When it asks for a forwarding address, type in your full College of PNHS address (username@pnhs.purdue.edu or username@pharmacy.purdue.edu) and say "OK". Then select your College of PNHS address as the address you would like advertised and say "OK".
Q: How do I forward all my E-mail from my College of PNHS E-mail account to my Purdue E-mail account (or any other account)?
A: Follow these instructions:
- Log into https://webmail.pnhs.purdue.edu/.
- Click on "Options" near the top of the screen.
- Click on "Autoresponder / Mail Forwarding"
- Check the box marked "Forward incoming messages to addresses listed below" and put the forwarding address in the box.
- UNCHECK the box marked "Keep copies of incoming messages in this account"
- Click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.
NOTE: DO NOT forward E-mail from your College of PNHS account to your Purdue E-mail account if you are also forwarding E-mail from Purdue to PNHS. If you set up a "forwarding loop" the server will drop your mail.
Q: How do I set my College of PNHS E-mail to notify people that I will be out of the office and not replying to E-mail?
A: Yes. see the On Vacation Replying HOWTO.
Q: How do I check my quota usage for my College of PNHS email?
A: Log into https://webmail.pnhs.purdue.edu/. Your quota usage will show up as a colored bar in the upper-left corner. (see example below)
Example of mail quota displayQ: Can I get rid of the "Fwd: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA" message?
A: This message is the result of a weird interaction between the text-based E-mail client "pine" and pop E-mail clients like Eudora. This message can be safely deleted despite its warning.
To fix this interaction problem between text-based mail clients and pop-based E-mail clients, you need to stop pine from creating the messages. To do this, start the "pine" E-mail client and at the Main Menu choose "S"etup. Then at the setup menu, choose "C"onfig. Find the "quell-folder-internal-msg" option and 'X' the box. Then "E"xit the Setup Configuration menu and commit the changes.
Q: Is there a good site for looking up viruses and other computer security information?
A: The US Department of Energy has an excellent security and virus site at http://www.ciac.org/ciac/. If you get a virus warning, this is a good site to use to check the validity of the warning.
Do not send out virus warnings to the entire College of PNHS, even if the warning tells you to "forward this to everyone you know".. Instead forward any virus warnings you are concerned about to the College of PNHS postmaster (postmaster@pnhs.purdue.edu) and the postmaster will handle it from there.
Q: What should I do when I think I've received a virus-infected E-mail message?
A: The College of PNHS E-mail server has software which removes any E-mail attachment that has a "bad extension" - such as .exe, .pif, .bat, or .scr. Any E-mail which passes through the College of PNHS E-mail server will have these attachments removed whether incoming or outgoing. This will stop most viruses from getting through the College of PNHS E-mail server. You can circumvent this process by adding the extension ".RENAME" to your filename before attaching it to your E-mail message. This will then require the recipient to rename the file before he or she will be able to open the attachment with the appropriate program.
Never open any attachment you are suspicious of. Be particularly wary of attachments that you aren't expecting or attachments that are from people you don't know. Any attachments with an ".exe", ".com", ".bat", ".pif", ".vbs", or ".lnk" extension are probably viruses. Also be wary of messages with double extensions like "baby.gif.exe".
Forward all suspicious E-mail messages to the College of PNHS's postmaster at postmaster@pnhs.purdue.edu. He will take a look at the message and tell you whether or not it is infected. Once you're sure the message is infected, deleted it.
Also, when sending an infected message to the postmaster, including the full headers will be very helpful. The particular line of interest looks like the following:
Received: from foo (foo.pharmacy.purdue.edu [128.210.116.247]) by sparky.pharmacy.purdue.edu (8.10.2/8.10.2) with ESMTP id f8D27k508853; Wed, 12 Sep 2001 21:07:46 -0500 (EST)
See the Full Headers HOWTO for information on how to send the full headers with your mail message.
I received an e-mail stating that I sent a virus to someone. What should I do?
Recently, one of our faculty wrote and said:
>
> I obviously have a problem with viruses because I'm receiving all sorts
> of bounced back messages from people whom I've never e-mailed.
>
Our reply was:
Actually, you have viruses forging e-mail in your name. The newer viruses, when they infect a computer, scan all the files for e-mail addresses, then send copies of themselves to all of those addresses, picking one of them to use as the "from" address. So someone you have corresponded with has been infected, but it probably isn't you.
A couple of years ago, the viruses would send e-mail in your name only when they infected your computer, so a number of e-mail gateways were configured to send alerts back so you could clean up your machine. Now that viruses are picking "From" addresses at random, these alerts are pretty useless, but a number of sysadmins keep them up anyway because "they tell you something".
It was also asked:
>
> Is there a way to deal with this? Should I put in a work request?
>
And we said:
Well, we'd like to find the people who wrote these viruses and make them suffer for it, but even that won't stop the viruses from spreading now that they are out "in the wild". Unfortunately, there's not much we can do besides keeping our own house clean.
If you're worried, you can file a work request and someone will come up and make sure your machine is clean. But we can't stop the "you sent a virus" messages from coming, because they depend on things outside our borders.
Q: Is there anyway I can deal with spam or any other person who is abusing my mailbox?
A: The College of PNHS E-mail server has spam tagging software that will tag E-mail message the are most likely spam. Note that no tagging software is perfect and some legitimate E-mail will be tagged and some spam will not be tagged. However, the tagging software is pretty good at catching spam and you can use the tags to either visually determine that a message is spam or use a filter to move tagged message to a folder in order to deal with it at a convenient time. You can also use a filter to delete E-mail from a user which is abusing your mailbox.
If an E-mail message is particularly nasty - like from a porn site with offensive pictures, you can ask that the College of PNHS E-mail server block E-mail from certain sites. Send a copy of the mail message with the full headers (see the instructions) to postmaster@pnhs.purdue.edu.
