Your E-mail Account at Hunter

Since fall of 1996, an e-mail account is automatically created for every student at Hunter. Make use of this great opportunity. If have not used your e-mail account at Hunter, here is how you find out about it. In addition, there are many web sites that offer free e-mail accounts. There are pro and cons to use of these rather than the account Hunter provides. Check my e-mail advice page for an overview.
 
 

Access from off-campus

You can access your Hunter e-mail account from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer connected to the Internet. All you need is a telnet program, and this is fairly standard for any computer with Internet access. Note, however, that some companies make it difficult or impossible to connect to the Internet (mostly for security reasons); so, you may have the latest Pentium computer at your workplace and still may not be able to access the Internet.

Telnet programs come in different varieties, running under different operating systems like DOS, Win3.x, and Win95. So even with an old clunker like a 286 station, you can run telnet. As there are many different telnet programs, I cannot give detailed instructions on how to use them, but the basics are the same for all telnet programs. First, you need to tell the telnet program the location you want to connect to. Here this would be either

depending on where you e-mail account is located. Then, once connected to the site, you enter your user name and password the same way you do it in the labs on campus.

If you have Netscape (or MS Internet Explorer) available, you can configure these "web browsers" to support telnet URLs. Newer versions have built-in telnet support, for older versions you need to tell the web browser where to find the telnet program. I skip the details because -- again -- they depend on type and version of the browser you use. But, if the browser is set up for telnet, you can use the following URL to connect to your Hunter e-mail account:

Of course, you need to replace "hejira" with "shiva" if your account is on "shiva" and "tsmith" with your own user name.
 

Using a POP mailer program

When using telnet you are using your computer as a terminal to the hejira or shiva computer at Hunter. Everything you do is executed (remotely) on this Hunter computer. All mail that you send and receive is stored in your private directory (a small portion) of this big machine at Hunter. Once you are disconnected (the telnet program is closed), you have no access to your mail.

The alternative is to manage your mail on your PC or work station with the help of a specific mailer program. There are many such programs including Eudora, Pegasus, and Netscape. The first two are genuine mailer programs, Netscape started out as a pure web browser, then added more feature to it like the Netscape mailer (in the recent version 4.5 called "Netscape Messenger'). Very recently, there is a reversal in trend. Now, you can either install the full Netscape suite (including the mailer and much more) or just the web browser. In addition, at some sites -- including very unfortunately, as of December 1998,  the labs on the 10th floor of HN -- the mail feature of Netscape is disabled. So whether or not you can use Netscape for managing your mail depends on the specific installation.

With mailer programs, you manage all mail on your (local) station. The mailer program also retrieves incoming mail from your e-mail account and initiates the sending of outgoing mail. This is a very attractive alternative for people having a computer at home or someplace else where they control access to this machine. In a lab setting, there are both advantages and disadvantages and the choice is more a matter of personal taste. POP stands for post office protocol, which specifies in technical detail how the mailer program on your local station connects to shiva/hejira to retrieve and to send mail.

Eudora Light (in contrast to Eudora Pro available in the Hunter labs -- a version some fewer bells and whistles) and Pegasus can be found on the Web for free as is true for Netscape (as long as don't expect tech support via telephone).
 

Forwarding all mail to another account

If you have an e-mail account already, e.g., via a subscription to AOL, you may not want to check for mail on more than one e-mail account. On the other hand, it is much easier for an instructor to send e-mail to all students in a class using the Hunter e-mail accounts (because he or she can request special class addresses and mail send to this one address is automatically distributed to all students in this class).

The easiest way to make both instructor and student happy is to set up the student's Hunter account such that all mail sent to this account is automatically forwarded to the student's preferred e-mail address. To achieve this, the student needs to access his/her e-mail account via telnet and create a file named ".forward" (yes, the first character of the file name is a dot ["."]) which contains one single line, the preferred e-mail address. Detailed instructions.