Your ice.cream.org account includes an extremely fast, reliable and flexible email system. Ice is running a mail server system called Qmail. Qmail is a secure and efficient program which handles your incoming and local outgoing messages.
The standard way ice accounts are set up is for a POP3 email account. POP3 is the method you can use to collect your email from the server to your local computer, using any email software, such as Eudora, Netscape, MS Outlook, The Bat or whatever.
Your primary ice email address will be based on your login name. If you login as james then your email address will be james@cream.org
Email sent to this address will be delivered into your ice account, and can be picked up via POP3 and your email client. The settings you should use to pick up the email are normally similar to:-
POP3 Server: ice.cream.org
username (or account): james (your username here of course)
password: your ice password.
Your client will also want to know what the outgoing or SMTP server settings should be.You can not use ice.cream.org as your outgoing or SMTP server, this is to stop non-ice account holders from abusing the ice mail server to send spam. You must set up your outgoing or SMTP server to be the mail server for the ISP you are dialled up with. If for instance you use Claranet to dial up (a great choice!) you would set your outgoing or SMTP mail host to be mail.clara.net.
You may already have an email address where you pick up your email, and you might want for conveniences sake to have mail sent to you at your username@cream.org address forwarded automatically to another email address. This is no problem, and you can set this up for yourself. In order to do this you will need to replace or edit the file called .qmail which is located in your home directory. This file tells Qmail where you want to have your email delivered. Normally it contains something like: ./Maildir/ which means you wish to pick up your email using POP3 and qmail should put your message in a special directory called Maildir inside your home directory. If you want your mail forwarded elswhere, simply change this file to contain your email address with an & sign before it.
Let's say James wants to have his email forwarded to his james@otherisp.com account, he would telnet into his ice.cream.org account, and type:-
echo &james@otherisp.com > .qmail
(which is a unix command to print the email address into the file called .qmail (and replace whatever is already in the file)
NOTE that the .qmail filename begins with a full stop. this is a standard format for configuration files in Unix, and the files are hidden unless you specify the "all" option when you do a file listing. So typing: ls to list the files in your directory won't show you your .qmail file, but typing: ls -a (the all files option) will show you the files beginning with a full stop.
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You could also read your email using a text based mail reader, from within your account. Telnet into your ice.cream.org account and invoke the mail client called "mutt". Just type mutt to do this. It is possible to check your email with mutt and then collect it later with your POP3 mail client, this provides a quick way of checking your email for something important, perhaps while you are away, or not able to easily set up another POP3 client.
For more information about mutt (or until we create some more info here) you should read the mutt manual by typing man mutt on the command line or on-line at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/mutt/manual.html
There's another good web page with common questions and answers about mutt here http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~leitner/mutt/faq.html
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Most ice cream accounts have also been set up with a subdomain. This is used for your web page address and also can be used for an unlimited amount of email address aliases. Your subdomain may be the same as your login name, or it may be something else entirely. Like most things on ice, there's no hard and fast rule about what you get given! Lets say your subdomain is face.cream.org. Your web pages will be accessed with http://face.cream.org/ (more about that in the web page section of this manual)
You'll also be able to recieve email to any address at all @subdomain.cream.org (where the word subdomain is different for each user). So in the face.cream.org example anything@face.cream.org will work, webmaster@face.cream.org and support@face.cream.org and whatever else you may want.
These addresses by default go into your POP3 special Mail Directory, and are therefore just aliases for your primary email account. They can be collected in the normal way as described above. HOWEVER! you can forward these extra addresses to any number of different places, so you could set up webmaster@face.cream.org to infact go to john@amoeba.org while support@face.cream.org will go to support@microsoft.com etc.. The way this works, is by first of all defining where the default place for your subdomain mail to go is, in a file called .qmail-subdomain-default
The file .qmail-subdomain-default will already have ./Maildir/ in it, meaning that by default all mail to your subdomain should go into your main POP3 mail box for normal collection. You may want to change that default action to forward mail by default to another address, this is as simple as putting the address you want preceeded by an & sign, into the .qmail-subdomain-default file. Lets say that the user who has face.cream.org wants any mail sent to @face.cream.org to go to his compuserve account (which he hasn't yet cancelled!), so he replaces the text in his .qmail-face-default file with &sadperson@compuserve.com.
Now once you've set up a default place for mail to go to within your own subdomain, you can customise individual email addresses to forward to other places. You can give your best friend Bill a mail alias of bill@face.cream.org which will forward to Bills email address (Bill has already got an email address with aol, bill@aol.com) The way to do that is to create a new qmail control file called .qmail-face-bill and put bills address inside it &bill@aol.com. (of course, replace face with your own subdomain name, and replace Bill with your own best friend!)
You can infact have any number of email addresses specified in your .qmail files, so support@subdomain.cream.org could infact contain &bob@someplace.com then on the next line bill@aol.com and the next line fish@tank.com etc..
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Another feature offered to all ice users is the ability to set up an excellent mailing list management system using a program called ezmlm. This subject needs another set of web pages, which will eventually appear in this manual. For now, if you can't wait to start up a mailing list you can have a look at the ezmlm manual on the command prompt type man ezmlm
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Finally you can actually get quite clever and complex, and you can pipe your incoming email into scripts and programs for processing / filtering etc. We won't go into this here, but as an example of something that any Ice user could do with enough time and knowledge, have a look at http://mailfun.cream.org/
For more information about how qmail works with Maildir's etc have a browse of the qmail home pages at http://www.qmail.org/
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If you find all this confusing, don't panic, it's mostly actually pretty simple, and someone will know what to do and be able to help out, email helpdesk@cream.org with any questions.
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On a final note, if you have a domain name registered that you wish to use with your ice mail setup, this is not a problem. Please talk to Jake or Nick about this. We can register domain names for anyone at "cost price" (eg, lowest possible price, with no profit) and can set up our nameserver to handle requests for the domain. US domain names (ie those ending with .com or .org currently cost $35 per year, (about 20 pounds) with the first 2 years to be paid at once.