Mail

For Unix Mail Users

An alternative to using the Unix mail interface is to switch to using an Imap client and have your mail served up from one of the department's Imap mail servers. See this page for more information on Imap. Basically, you've got to get lab to make a mailbox for you at mylogin.mail.cs.washington.edu and to ensure that your mail is directed to the machine hosting that DNS name.

You now need to configure your Mail client to speak to the departmental mail servers. There are two aspects of configuration: getting your mail and sending your mail. I'll describe both below, assuming that you are using the Mac Mail program. If you are using another Mail client, such as Eudora, you'll need to map these instructions into those appropriate for your client.

1. Create a new mail account in Mac Mail.

2. Under Account Information, specify account type Imap, give your CS
email address, your incoming mail server as
mylogin.mail.cs.washington.edu, where "mylogin" is your email
address. Finally, give your UW CSE password.

3. Under outgoing mail server, you can either specify
mailhost.cs.washington.edu, which will have outgoing mail sent
through the department's mail server, or specify smtp.washington.edu,
which will send outgoing mail through the campus mail server.  Here,
you will need to set the options so that outgoing mail is sent using
secure sockets and the authentication method is "password."  Give
your login name and password. If you are sending through
smtp.washington.edu, your login and password should be those of your
UW netid, otherwise they should be your CS login and password.

4. Under "Advanced Options" you need to provide two paths.  The
first, called "Account Directory" is the directory on your Mac where
you want mail to be cached or stored.  The second, Imap Path Prefix,
is the path relative to your home directory on your imap server
(mylogin.cs.washington.edu) where mail should be kept.  I use the
directory "Imap" here.  If you leave this off, your mail client will
scan your home directory and interpret all of your folders as Mail
folders. This is a bit strange.

5. Also under advanced options, specify port 993 for Imap, Use SSL,
and use Password authentication. If you don't do this, mail won't
work.

For Exchange Users

NOTE: As of Oct 2003, MS has released a new version of Entourage, so if you want to try it, see the MS page which describes how to get it. The flowchart is particularly enlightening :-). Otherwise, read on.

Consequently, as an Exchange user, you must make a choice as to how to access your mail. One option is to struggle with the OS 9 emulator client and simply restart whenever it fails. This gets old pretty fast however. The second option is to run Outlook in a Virtual PC emulator. Believe it or not, this works. The problem in the end though is with integrating your mail with everything else you like to do (like print, save files, etc). It's doable, but it's a pain. A third option is to use OWA to access your mail via a web browser. This is good in a pinch, but the OWA interface is clunky for anything serious. I don't recommend you do this.

This leads us to the fourth option: stop using Exchange. While this may sound scary, it's really not all that bad, and once you're off of Exchange, you'll wonder how you ever managed to live with it. Basically, Exchange offers you four functions:

1. Remote mail service with backed up repository
2. Client side caching
3. An Address Book
4. Shared calendaring

Although the Mac Mailer does not give you an address book directly, it is very well integrated with the separate Mac Address Book application. So, if there's a name in your address book, the Mac Mailer knows how to read it.

The Mac mail DOES NOT GIVE you shared calendaring however. This is currently a big drawback with the Mac. If you are a heavy user of shared calendaring in Microsoft Exchange, and the alternatives are not appropriate for you, then you will need to run an Exchange client on your Mac for calendaring (you may choose to also use it for Mail, but I would recommend against it. Calendaring is pretty stylized and doable under Virtual PC.)

I recommend that you have a look at the native Mac calendaring program (iCal) and see if it provides a viable solution to your calendaring needs. With iCal you can publish your calendar to other Mac users (either by way of .Mac services, or by way of a WebDAV server run by the department). Alternatively, you can also publish your calendar for the whole world (literally) to see on your .Mac account. Although they can see it, they can not change it. Be aware as well that your calendar is WORLD READABLE if you do this.

How to Stop Being an Exchange User

1. First, from an outlook client export your
addresses to a tab delimited file in Windows format.  Follow the
File|Export from the toolbar.  Say you've called that file foo.txt.

2. Then, move the file over to your Mac. (If you run the outlook client
inside Virtual PC, you can skip this step if you save the file onto a
Mac Shared folder).  

3. Then, on your Mac, from the Finder, open "/Library/Scripts/Mail/Import Addresses.scpt"
(in Applications/Apple Script).  Select "Controls|Run."  You'll be
asked to choose the application to import from.  Select "Entourage".
Then, specify that you want to import from a file and give it the
file that you put on your Mac in step 2.

The next option is to wait until MS delivers a version of Entourage that works with the native Exchange protocol. Then, you can either run Entourage to access your Exchange mail, OR you can follow the steps in the previous paragraph to move your mailboxes from Entourage (exchange server) to Entourage (Imap server). From the press release howewer, it's not clear how long you'll have to wait for this. Other documents hint that this will be ready sometime Summer 2003.

Another option is to lobby lab to reenable imap service on the exchange server. Then, create an imap account on Mac Mail, connect to the exchange server, and copy all the mail folders to your local machine. Then, connect to your Unix Imap account, and copy all the folders back over to the new server. This will work as long as the exchange server doesn't freeze up in the middle.

The remaining option is basically straightforward. You will ask Outlook to make a mail archive, then you'll go to a Linux machine where you can run a program to convert from Outlook's PST format to Unix Mail format. Then, you'll copy the Mail that you just created over to our Mac. Then, you'll ask the Mac Mail program to import the mail. Finally, you'll move the newly imported Mail folders to your Imap server directly from within the Mac Mail client.

Here are the steps to follow.

To export your mail to a PST file, start up outlook on a Windows box (or in Virtual PC for Mac running Windows) and select File|Export and then select all. Put the mail into a PST file called "migrate.pst". It's likely to be large.

Now, copy the pst file onto a Linux machine (you can use Virtual PC running Linux if you like).

Now, get yourself a copy of "readpst" which is a Linux program that converts outlook PST files into standard Unix mail format. You can do this either by visiting this archive, and then compiling the libpst tree you download, OR you can simply save this link to a file called "readpst" to get a pre-compiled version.

Now, follow these instructions exactly as I've specified:

1. On the Linux box, make a new directory called Migrate.
2. Move the migrate.pst file into Migrate.
3. Move the readpst file into Migrate
4. CD into the Migrate directory.
4. Make a new directory called Target in the Migrate directory.
5. run:  ./readpst -o Target -r migrate.pst
6. You now have a new directory filled with all your mail in Unix mail
format.
7. Copy the Target directory to your Mac machine (put it someplace
unimportant, like /tmp)
8. Start up Mac Mail and select 'File|Import Mailboxes'
9. Choose "Standard mbox files"
10. When asked for the name of the folder, use "/tmp/Target"
11. You'll now be shown a bunch of checked mail folders.  Assuming
you want them all, select "OK".
12. The mail will be imported and placed in a Mail folder "On My Mac"
13. You can now copy the folders you want directly to your Imap
server. This may take some time, so be patient.

That's it. Your mail is now on the Imap server.

At this point, if you don't need Exchange any longer, send a message to support and tell them to deactivate your exchange account. You're free.

How to specify an LDAP server to the Mac Mail client

Name: UW LDAP Server
Server: directory.cs.washington.edu
Search Base: 
Port: 389
Scope: Subtree

With this, mail recipient names will be automatically expanded if they can be found in the department's LDAP database. NOTE: The dept web pages on LDAP say that search base should be

 ou=Computer Science and Engineering,o=University of Washington,c=UW

Lastly, LDAP only works when you are coming in from a CS host. It will fail silently from elsewhere.

How do I create a new Mail folder with the Mac Mailer?

The Mac Mail client allows you to put msgs in folders, and folders in folders that only contain folders, but you can not put a folder in a folder that also contains messages. Similarly, you can move a message to a folder that has only msgs in it, but you can not move a msg to a folder that contains a folder.

So, if you want create a folder called A in your root mail directory, and you intend to put only mail in it, then select your root mail folder in the Mailer and opt-click-NEW-MAILBOX... and specify A.

If you want to create a folder B in your root mail directory and you intend to put a subfolder C in it that will contain only mail then specify NEW-MAILBOX with the new name B/C.

At this point, you can put mail in C, but can not use C for more folders. And you can use B for more folders, but can not put mail in it.

If you find that you want to change your structure (eg, you want to make A a folder containing folders) than make a new folder D/SomeFolderName and then move all the mail from A to SomeFolderName, delete A, and then rename D to A.

Why is it this way?

Because "folders" containing mail are implemented by the UW IMAP SERVER (that is, the one written here at UW) as files and folders containing only folders are implemented as directories. If you tried to create a subfolder in a mail folder, the server would want to create a directory inside a file, which would be a little bit like when Spock asked M5 to compute pi to the last digit. M5, not being as smart as either the Mac mailer or the UW IMAP server, gave it its best shot, but then ends up seg faulting, thereby saving the crew from a runaway computer. This sort of thing happens all the time with the Exchange server, so it's easy to appreciate the Mac Mailer's built in limitation.

The Mac mailer is pretty clear about this limitation when you are creating a new folder when it says "if you want to make a folder Personal containing another folder, say Fun, then call your new folder Personal/Fun." (ok, it's not pretty clear, but when you understand what it's trying to say to you, it's clear).

Note that the cache maintained on the client side actually looks like what you think it should look like, with each mail folder being its own directory.

Considerations on the Unix IMAP Server mailbox format

In either case, you'll find that the default "real world" settings of CSE's IMAP server are not quite what you would like. By default, IMAP stores mail in standard Berkeley mbox format. This is the format made famous by programs like /usr/ucb/mail and from... basically, a mailbox is a collection of messages, with each message delimited by a blank line followed by a line starting with "From." Pretty simply, for sure, but it creates problems with concurrent access (doesn't work so well -- one or more of the concurrent clients generally fails without generating an error at the mail reader), and performance when files get big.

An alternative (that is, better) solution is to use the ".mbx" format which, without getting technical, supports concurrent access and performs better. See this report for a more detailed description on the various mailbox formats."

Fortunately, UW CSE's IMAP server is able to handle mailboxes in either the Berkeley mbox or .mbx format. By default, it uses mbox. You can tell it, on a mailbox by mailbox basis, to use the other format. There are two elements to this conversion:

• For existing mailboxes, you will use a utility called "mailutil" that converts your mailbox over from the old format to the new format.
• For new mailboxes, when you create them you will use a special naming syntax that the IMAP server recognizes.

Converting over existing mailbox files

FIRST, GO TO EACH AND EVERY CLIENT MACHINE WHERE YOU HAVE AN IMAP CLIENT RUNNING AND KILL IT. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DO ANY OF THIS CONVERSION WHILE YOU ARE RUNNING A CLIENT.

NOTE: You may choose to make a copy of your mbox first -- don't forget to delete the copy once everything's working!

Assuming you have mailutil in your path (if not, specify it with the appropriate path), run the following from the command line ON THE MACHINE WHERE YOUR IMAP MAIL IS STORED (eg, the SERVER MACHINE -- do NOT run this on your Mac):

cd     
mailutil copy mbox '#driver.mbx/INBOX'

Once you've done this, you should have a file called INBOX in your home directory. It is in .mbx format. You can verify that it's ok by starting up a mail client somewhere and having a look at your inbox. You should notice a couple of things -- first, it's much faster to refresh, access, etc. Second, once you come in from a second client at the same time, mail that shows up in one place shows up in all.

Now that you're feeling pretty good about converting over your mbox file, you can go ahead and convert over each of your mailbox folders. You don't have to do this, but there's really no reason not to.

OF COURSE, REMEMBER TO KILL ANY MAIL CLIENTS BEFORE YOU DO THIS.

For each mail folder (really, big flat file) living in some directory, say dir1/dir2, you convert it over as follows:

mailutil copy dir1/dir2/folder '#driver.mbx/dir1/dir2/folder.mbx'
mv dir1/dir2/folder.mbx dir1/dir2/folder

As before, you may want to back up your mail before you try this just in case.

If you've got tons of mail folders, you might want to run write a little shell script to do this.

Creating a new folder in .mbx format.

#driver.mbx/Jokes

One last word