Mail for students

Overview

The CIP mail system offers comprehensive services for email communication. These include sending and receiving mail (SMTP), reading mail through different protocols (IMAP/S, POP/S), forwarding mail. The RBG considers mail to be one of the most important services of all and therefor does its best to ensure the robustness, security and stability of the service.

ATTENTION: Mail forwarding is be discontinued at 1.10.2018. (Announcemnet)

Server

• SMTP: smtpin1.ifi.lmu.de (Port 587; password plain; STARTTLS )
• IMAP/S: imap.cip.ifi.lmu.de
  • Port 993; password plain; TLS
• HTTP/S: webmail.cip.ifi.lmu.de

User and passwort are the CIP account data (without @cip…!).

Which protocols can be used from where in the world can be read in the next topic. We recommend to refrain from using POP because a lot of the services (e.g. filtering) only work reasonably with IMAP.

Security

Operation

We try to test all software and configurations comprehensively before transfering them to the production system. Every mail gets duplicated on arrival in our system. The original is sent to the live server while the duplicate gets saved on a backup server. The backup server takes over in case of a live server outage. The backup server is periodically synced with the live server to replicate changes to the IMAP directory structure.

Firewall

The unencrypted variants of IMAP/POP can only be used inside the network of the institute. Outside this network area the use of the TLS variants IMAP/S and POP/S is mandatory.

Filter

You can define your own filter rules. Mailfilter allows you to sort received mails into different folders or ignore them. You need to create specific rules for this. The RBG offers a webfrontend to help you create your filter rules. You can find this frontend inside CipConf together with the frontend for configuring Virus and Spam filtering.

Virus scanning takes place immediately upon receiving an email. If a potential virus is detected several Mailtags get added to the header of the email (X-Virus-rc, X-Virus-Scanned). A virus email has the following line in its mail header:

X-Amavis-Alert: INFECTED

SPAM detection is performed on the email on its way through the mail system. If a potential SPAM mail is detected several Mailtags get added to the header of the email (X-Spam-Flag, X-Spam-Status, X-Spam-Level, X-Spam-Report, X-Spam-Checker-Version). A SPAM email has the following line in its mail header:

X-Spam-Flag: YES

Please note:

• Without filter rules virus and spam mails will not be treated differently from normal mails.
• A filter rule which evaluates the content (body) of a mail will not work on encrypted mails due to system properties.
• Encrypted mails can not be detected as SPAM or virus contaminated due to system properties.

Mail Clients

You can use any mail client that supports the IMAP or POP protocol. The CIP-Pool installation uses Thunderbird as the default mail client for the graphical user environment. If you want to read email in xterm or from console we recomend alpine or mutt.

Quota

Currently no quota is set for student mailboxes. We will contact the mailbox owner should we find mailboxes significantly larger than the norm.

Administration of your own mail config

You can administrate your own mail config through CipConf.

Legal considerations

The RBG is of the oppinion that it is unlawful to block emails without consent of the recipient. Every spam or virus filter has occasional errors of the second kind (mails get erroneously flagged as spam/virus). Because of this we only tag mail as spam or virus and leave it to the recipient to decide what to do with the mail.