Guidelines for using E-mail at CERN

If you receive your E-mail at CERN, you should use a "generic E-mail address" of the form: firstname.familyname@cern.ch. This is a synonym for your "preferred E-mail address", which is the physical address where you receive and read your mail. Your generic address can be defined once only and will never need to change, even if you read your mail outside CERN. Your preferred E-mail address can be modified as many times and as frequently as you wish, by using xuserinfo on any of the CERN central computer services. It should point to the machine (anywhere in the world) where you want to receive your mail and must be a valid Internet address. Any mail sent to your generic address will be automatically forwarded to your preferred address: as long as you have given your generic address to your correspondents, any changes to your preferred address will be transparent to them.

The recommended way to receive mail at CERN is to use the Mail Server, a service provided by CERN's IT division. The server acts like a post office box, which will store your mail until you retrieve it using a mail client.

If your mail client supports the IMAP protocol (e.g. pine or Netscape from version 4) you can choose to archive your mail in folders on the mailserver, which has the advantage of making your archived mail accessible from anywhere in the world at the same time as your new mail.

If your mail client only supports the POP3 protocol (e.g. Netscape up to version 3) your new mail will be downloaded to your local system (where you are running your client) when you read it for the first time. This is OK if you always read your mail from the same system, but is inconvenient if you run your client on different systems at different times (e.g. your PC at home, your workstation in your homelab, aloha at CERN) because your archived mail will be spread between the different systems.

To use the CERN mailserver service, and to migrate your existing mail folders to it, follow these instructions.

Marco Cattaneo 19th March 1999