Files that affect your mail
The default mail setup at Nevis works for most users. However, if you'd like finer control over your e-mail, mail notifications, mail forwarding, spam processing, mail filtering, or are trying to fix a mail problem, the following information can be useful.
In the descriptions below,
$user
is the name of your Nevis
Linux cluster login account.
/a/mail/inbox/$user
This is the file that contains the contents of your INBOX. On the mail server, it's located in
/mail/inbox/$user
, but the above path makes the file visible on other the other systems on the cluster via
automount.
/a/mail/folders/$user
This is the default location of your
IMAP mail files. On the mail server, this path is
/mail/folders/$user
, but the above path makes the file visible on other the other systems on the cluster via
automount.
/a/mail/folders/$user/.subscriptions
This file contains the list of IMAP folders that you see in your mail reader. For the most part, you don't have to change the contents of this file; you can drag, drop, create, (un)subscribe, etc., using your mail program. But every once in a while, it's easier to edit this text file than it is to manually click on lots of different folders.
/a/mail/forward/$user
or ~/.forward
The forwarding file controls how your e-mail is
forwarded, and can also be used to automatically send
vacation messages.
There are two places where you can put your forwarding instructions:
/a/mail/forward/$user
or
~/.forward
. The latter name is the standard location for a forwarding file, and it's supported at Nevis. The former location is preferred, however, since the file will remain available to the mail server if your home directory becomes unavailable; e.g., if your
group's server goes down.
If you have both files
/a/mail/forward/$user
and
~/.forward
, only the lines in the former will be interpreted. The latter will be ignored.
/a/mail/procmailrc/$user
or ~/.procmailrc
See the
Procmail page for details.
~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
For the most part, you can ignore the contents of your
~/.spamassassin/
directory, which is automatically created for you the first time you receive mail at Nevis. The one file that you might want to look at is
~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
, which allows you to control the functionality of
SpamAssassin.
Your mail reader may also offer spam-filtering options. See
this page on configuring SpamAssassin for why this is not the best option.