Get GMail Now!

1. Pine : For true Unix/Linux stalwarts using pine or alpine 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 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.


2. 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. (See, we're still not biased!)
   
   Note that using Thunderbird/Eudora when you are off-campus does not always work since we limit access to POP3/IMAP/SMTP from off-campus sites. The best bet for using these clients off-campus is to forward a copy of your mail to GMail and then point Thunderbird/Eudora to GMail's POP3 server. It works much easier and more securely than trying to connect to LEVEE directly!


3. 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 own encrypted web based mail. Just make sure you set your browser to accept our open source SSL encryption certificate since we did not want to spend real money to buy a verified one. We are not going to post our 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 GMail, Windows Live, or Yahoo Mail account as well. You can also use a GMail account to access your LEVEE mail by going into "Settings" and picking the "Accounts" tab and selecting "Get mail from other accounts". We have LEVEE set to allow Google to grab mail from its POP3 server. One of the nice things about GMail is that it lets you send mail using an external address, so you can send mail as whoever@wustl.edu right from your GMail account! Look here for my LEVEE via GMail remote access page. I am going to write up Live@Edu page as well since for some insane reason the university is going that route.

Spam Filtering - Levee: Levee has spam filtering using three separate filterings methods:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!!!

  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