Levee E-Mail at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
LEVEE is our ever popular e-mail server. Most of the faculty and staff of
the department use LEVEE as their mail server, but others use their own.
If you are in Seismology you should contact
Patrick Shore for an account on
MANTLE, and if you are in Ray's lab you should contact
Tom Stein for an account there.
Click here to get an account on LEVEE
Using LEVEE mail you can access it a few different ways:
- Pine : For true Unix/Linux stalwarts using pine is the way to go.
You simply SSH to levee.wustl.edu and login with your username and
password, and then you type pine. It has built in help and is actually very
easy to use. Note that SSH access is limited to specific locations
unless you are very nice and give us a static IP address which we can enable.
Otherwise you will have to telnet/ssh to artsci first and then SSH over
to LEVEE. Incidentally, if you need a good SSH client to connect to artsci or
LEVEE securely, you can find one on our
software page. MacOSX and
Linux users should have OpenSSH built into their systems.
- Thunderbird/Eudora :
For Windows/Mac clients we prefer people use
Mozilla Thunderbird,
which is not only free, but also very powerful and easy to use. We also
used to recommend Eudora which was the most popular client folks used here,
but now it sounds like they are going to merge with Thunderbird. We have an
easy link to download them from our freeware site for both
Windows or
Macintosh.
Just about any mail client that uses the
POP3 protocol should work fine with LEVEE too. Brave people can use
Outlook or Outlook Express as well, but we are not that fond of them and not as
experienced as with Eudora, so use those memory hogging, security holes at
your own risk. (At least we're not biased!)
- WebMail : For web based e-mail there are a few options. You can
simply forward your LEVEE mail to artsci and use theirs, or you can use our own
secret URL for our encrypted web based mail. We are not going to post that
URL out here where everybody can see it, so you can just
e-mail me for that URL. You can also just
forward your mail to a
Hotmail or
Yahoo Mail account as well.
Incidentally, if anyone in the university wants a GMail (Google Mail)
account, just e-mail me since I have a
billion GMail invites.
Spam Filtering - Clients. Thunderbird and the Mac Mail vlient both
have a nice spam filter built-in which
includes adaptive learning. Eudora isn't quite as good, but you can use
this guide to help you set up
some pretty good spam filtering on Eudora. Outlook supposedly has some spam
filtering capabilities included as well, but unfortunately, it is still Outlook.
Spam Filtering - Levee: Levee has spam filtering using three
separate filterings methods:
- The ArtSci Barracuda appliance first tags all
the messages
it thinks is spam as "*WU-SPAM*". We grab all those messages so they do
not appear in anybody's inboxes but we do not automatically delete them.
- We
then have procmail filters on LEVEE that further divert messages into specific
mailboxes such as phishing spam, viruses, sexually explicit spam and so forth.
We typically just let these grow all the time but we try to only keep about 1GB
of filtered mail alive before time to start deleting the oldest ones. No one
will really miss all those stock tips and special prices on Viagra and Cialis.
- We also have
a local copy of spamassassin running on LEVEE to filter out spam by annoying
spammers who bypass MX records and therefore send junk directly to LEVEE that
misses the Barracuda. We collect lots and lots of spam!!!
Other things to note about the mail on LEVEE is that we are filtering out all
windows executable files by default (i.e. all .EXE, .COM, .SCR, .PIF) that
come in as attachments, and also small ZIP files which are usually worms.
We are able to block out any problematic domains and addresses on a per
user basis so let
us know if you are getting spammed to death by anyone in particular (no, that
does not include Gail!)
Also note that LEVEE actually has many different names, so you can give
out a "vanity" address that resolves to LEVEE. The following will all
currently work:
username@levee.wustl.edu
username@epsc.wustl.edu
username@epscgrads.wustl.edu
username@geo.wustl.edu
username@geology.wustl.edu
username@geobiology.wustl.edu
username@geochemistry.wustl.edu
username@geophysics.wustl.edu
username@planetary.wustl.edu
username@wuspace.wustl.edu
Hugh Chou,
hugh@levee, Room 289, 5-4012
(add .wustl.edu to the e-mail address if e-mailing from off campus!)
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Geobiology 
