IMAP and Disk Space
Your NC State e-mail address lasts you the duration of your stay at NC State. You are allotted 50 MB of storage space for your e-mails. This is in addition to your 50 MB AFS disk quota (ie. personal account space in the Andrews File System) also allotted for your stay at NC State. For more information regarding NCSU email, feel free to visit the IMAP at NC State webpage. Although file storage space starts at 50MB, space allocation can be adjusted and more can be bought. By simply going to the SysNews web site and logging in to "User Info," Unity computing account holders can click on "Quota Manager" and increase their total quota allocation to 300 megabytes. ITD staff expect to make more quota available to Unity account holders in the coming months as they assess and analyze usage patterns for the new system.
Email Clients
Filtering
The most common way for people to get viruses today is through e-mail. Virus coders will write a program so that it looks up all the contacts in your address book and proceed to e-mail itself to these people as an attachment. Anti-Virus software typically auto-scans any e-mail attachment you may receive. However, it is often a good idea to double check this if you are unsure of the results of the scan. For more information regarding anti-virus software, please visit Wolftech's anti-virus website.
Your university e-mail also comes with a handy defense tool: Pure Message. Pure Message is a mail filtering agent that attempts to identify spam and viruses by using text analysis and predetermined definitions. Pure Message has various ways of dealing with viruses and spam and handles each email differently, based on it's their individual 'hit' percentages. For example, Pure Message adds one or both of it's detection headers to an email (based on the hit percentage), which makes filtering easier. Pure Message will strip any legitimate message of any virus that may be present and deliver the clean email. Any unlegitimate email messages (ie. virus-generated) will be removed from your inbox completely. It is important to note that Pure Message does not delete spam. For more information regarding Pure Message, including ways to improve its effectiveness, visit the Pure Message webpage.
For a history on the term spam and its usage, please visit this history of spam.
For specific information on configuration of certain e-mail clients, we highly reccommend Resnet's Email Setup page.
Vacation Message
One of the server-side filters can also be used to take certain steps when you will be away from your email for an extended period of time. Commonly called a "vacation" message, this functionality can let you notify email correspondents of your absence, possibly giving them an alternate contact or date for your return.
Important notes about this functionality:
You can determine how often a vacation message will be sent back to someone.
By defining this period of time, no matter how many emails someone sends you, they will only receive one reply from the system. For example, if you'll be gone for 2 weeks, you can set the interval for 7 days. Should someone email you during the first and second week, they will only receive one "vacation message" each week. Any additional emails they send you after the first will not result in a reply to them. This will prevent you from "spamming" people who send you a lot of emails while you're away. You must remember to manually turn the vacation email OFF when you get back.
There is no way to set a date to automatically start or end these messages.
Vacation emails will NOT be sent in reply to emails received from mailing lists.