Mail User Agent configuration

Note: the new CAL accounts will not receive e-mail until the DNS Transition

There are two ways to access your CAL e-mail account remotely: webmail and IMAP.

webmail

To access your account via webmail, go to ​https://mail.astro.columbia.edu/ and log in with your user name.

IMAP/SMTP

To access your account with IMAP and SMTP, you'll need to configure your Mail User Agent properly.

The basic settings are (if you don't understand these, skip to the example section for your favorite MUA):

IMAP Service:	either imaps (SSL-wrapped, port 993) or STARTTLS-capable imap (port 143) to mail.astro.columbia.edu
SMTP relay Service:	SMTP AUTH with STARTTLS required on submission (port 587) to mail.astro.columbia.edu

The TLS/SSL certificates are signed by the CAL Certificate Authority. Available SASL Authentication methods for both SMTP and IMAP are: GSSAPI (only within Pupin Hall) and LOGIN/PLAIN (everywhere, only permitted under an SSL or TLS layer).

The first example here is going to be for ​Thunderbird 1.5, but please feel free to add comparable instructions for your MUA of choice. The example assumes your CAL username is foo.

Thunderbird

initial, wizard setup

Go to Edit|Account Settings, and click the Add Account button (note: if this your first time opening Thunderbird, this step will probably happen automatically). This will take you through a wizard that can do most, but not all, of the configuration.

In the New Account Setup screen, Choose Email account and click Next

Then, in Identity, enter your full name and your CAL account (foo@astro.columbia.edu and click Next)

Next, in Server Information, choose IMAP and set the Incoming Server to mail.astro.columbia.edu. If Thunderbird lets you choose an outgoing (SMTP) server, enter mail.astro.columbia.edu for that as well. Click Next

Next, in User Names, put your username, bare, as Incoming User Name. e.g., foo Click Next

Now choose a name for thunderbird to associate with this account (e.g. foo@astro.columbia.edu), and click "Finish"

That's the first bit! Now you need to make a couple changes that couldn't be done in the wizard.

final tuning

Firstly, you may want to import the CAL Certificate Authority's root certificate into Thunderbird. Instructions on how to do this for Thunderbird are here.

Choose Edit|Account Settings... again, if that dialog box isn't already open.

In the left-hand pane, open the account you just made: foo@astro.columbia.edu (you may need to click the little + to expand that part of the tree), and select the Server Settings node underneath it.

Under the Security Settings, for Use secure connection, please choose SSL.

Again in the left-hand pane, select Outgoing Server (SMTP). If thunderbird let you enter an SMTP server during the wizard phase, you should see mail.astro.columbia.edu listed in the right-hand pane. If so, select it and click Edit. If not, click Add.

In the new dialog box, you want to set the following fields:

Description	CAL SMTP Server
Server Name	mail.astro.columbia.edu
Port	587	(note this is the submission port, not the standard smtp port)
Use name and Password	checked
User Name	foo	(of course, put your own user name here)
Use Secure Connection	TLS	(note that this field is TLS while the IMAP field uses SSL for this version of Thunderbird)

Click OK, OK, and proceed to check your e-mail!

Apple Mail

Go to Preferences, then click on Accounts and add a new account by clicking on +. Set the account type to be IMAP and enter your email address (i.e. foo@…). Click on continue.

For the incoming Mail server, enter mail.astro.columbia.edu and click continue. At this point you will get an error message saying that it was unable to connect -- ignore this (we'll fix this later). Click continue again. It will now ask for the authentication method for incoming mail. Check the SSL box and set it to Password.

For the outgoing mail server, set it to mail.astro.columbia.edu, check the Use Authentication box and enter your username and password. Again you will get an error message, but push on and finish creating the acount.

Once the account has been created, you will need to edit it. Again, from the preferences, choose Accounts. Select the new account you have created and click on Server Settings. You will need to change the port from 25 to 587. Make sure the Use SSL box is checked and Password authentication is selected. Click OK.

Finally, you will need to go back and put it online by ctrl-clicking on the new INBOX and selecting take online. You will get an error because it cannot determine the authenticity of the certificate, but at this point you can examine the certificate and accept it. The same thing will happen again the first time you try to send a message.

mutt

mutt is a well-maintained, free, console-based, IMAP-capable mail client. Configuring mutt is done by editing a text configuration file, stored in ~/.muttrc

On CAL configured workstations, you don't need to do any configuration to get mutt to work with your CAL mail account. It is already set up, thanks to /etc/Muttrc.d/cal.rc.

On systems without properly configured krb5 libraries, or systems outside of Pupin Hall, you probably want to add the following set of lines to ~/.muttrc to be able to check your CAL mail with mutt: (note: replace "username" with your CAL username!)

set imap_authenticators="login"
set spoolfile="imap://username@mail.astro.columbia.edu/INBOX"
set folder="imap://username@mail.astro.columbia.edu/INBOX"
set ssl_force_tls="yes"
set record="=Sent"
set postponed="=Drafts"

You may also want to instruct mutt to trust the CAL Certificate Authority by appending its root certificate to mutt's certificate_file (which by default is ~/.mutt_certificates). This will avoid prompting for accepting new certificates, and will let you interact more smoothly with CAL servers using encryption.