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Moving Your Mailstore
What is a mailstore?
A mailstore is the place in which your mail lives. All new mail is delivered to this place, and your mail client reads mail from it. By default at Kent your mailstore will be on either Live@Edu (for undergraduates or taught postgradutes) or ConnectMail (for staff and research postgraduates). As a CS student or staff member you can read your email from a CS server.
If you are a CS undergraduate you will have a raptor account, postgraduates will have a swallow account, and staff will have a myrtle account. You can read your mail on one of these servers.
Staff and research postgraduates using myrtle have the option of delivering the mail straight to myrtle. This means that as email comes in to the Kent mail servers it'll be directed straight on to our machines.
Undergraduates and taught postgraduates can no longer have mail delivered directly to their server, but we provide a script to regularly download email from Live@Edu.
Reasons why to change
Moving your mailstore is a relatively simple process, but why would you want to do this? Here are some of the benefits, and downsides, to changing your mailstore to a CS server.
Downsides to moving
- Quota - shared quota with your raptor filestore, but you'll only use a small amount of this quota with mail.
Benefits of moving
- Spam Checking - you can easily have your mail checked for spam.
- Flexibility - if you wish you can make customisations to how your mail is stored and delivered (filtering, forwarding, etc).
- Unix Access - you can directly access your mail folders from unix, so you can more easily use unix mail clients.
How to change a mailstore to a CS server
The first step is to make sure you know your CS password - this is the password your normally use to log in to your CS server. You can follow the instructions here to get a password, or you can visit the Welcome Desk in the Templeman Library.
The next step is to log in to your CS server. This document shows you how to do this using Putty for raptor - just change raptor to another name if you're using a different server. You can also use telnet if you are on campus.
This is the step that initiates the change to deliver your mail to the CS server.
Once you are logged in to the CS server type this at the prompt:
mailinfo -CThe move will be started and you may then need to contact us. Don't worry, no email will be lost during the move. Until we get back to you your email will continue to be delivered to your old mail store.
The next step is to add a new account to your mail client. This is usually straightforward. Find the section for adding a new account, usually located under the settings area. When prompted enter your name, e-mail address, and your CS server. It's recommended that you use IMAP rather than POP3.
Finally, you should be able to drag and drop mail from your old mail account to your new one. In Outlook express this is a simple process whereby you select all your old mail and drag it on to your new inbox.Changing back
If you want to backout you can change back to the central services by emailing helpdesk.