Recommended Mailers

How Do I Read Email at SEAS?

At Penn Engineering, users have several email programs to choose from. CETS recommends the following combination: use Thunderbird under IMAP configuration when reading mail from home, work, or your laptop, and use Webmail when reading mail elsewhere. CETS recommends picking one client and sticking with it, as using more than one at a time can result in lost mail. Never use more than one client simultaneously, as inbox corruption and mail loss can result. The rest of this article contains more detailed information about the several email clients SEAS supports.

Graphical Clients

Graphical clients are available on all lab systems and for free download from Penn Computing.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a free, easy to use email client from Mozilla. Follow the directions to configure Thunderbird to read your SEAS email.

Apple Mail

Mail is a graphical email client for Mac OS X. Follow the directions to configure Apple Mail to read your SEAS email.

Microsoft Outlook

Webmail

Webmail lets you read mail through your web browser. It has limited features, but it is very convenient. Webmail enables SEAS users to log onto a web site to retrieve and send messages.

You can use this site from any web-browser which has support for JavaScript and cookies. The below site redirects to a secure site, so the traffic (including your username, your password, and your email) between your web browser and the web server is encrypted to prevent "sniffing" of your password.

The Webmail URL: http://webmail.seas.upenn.edu

Mobile Devices

iPhone

Please visit the iPhone Mail Configuration article for more information.

Other Mobile Devices

If you have another mobile device please use the General Mail Configuration article.

Text-Based Clients

The clients in this section require you to log into Eniac's Unix shell. For information on logging in, please see How Do I Log Into Eniac?

Mutt

Mutt is the fastest, easiest to access, most secure mail program. It is highly customizable and can be used successfully with other mail programs. Mutt is free and available to anyone with a SEAS account. It is the recommended non-graphical mail program, especially for users who may occassionally read mail from public locations. When reading mail in public locations (computer labs, libraries, etc.), other mail programs such as Netscape Mail require clearing out configuration settings before leaving the machine or users risk having their messages accessed by strangers. When logging into your eniac account to read mail and in general, be sure to use SecureCRT or SSH (not telnet) to connect to eniac. Don't forget to logout of your account when you are done.

To start Mutt, enter

mutt

at the Eniac command prompt.

Follow the directions to configure Mutt to read your SEAS email. For additional documentation on using Mutt, see: http://www.mutt.org

Pine

Pine is not widely used, but provided for those who already know how to use it. Pine is less customizable than Mutt but is more user-friendly with its menu-driven format and clear instructions at every screen.

To start Pine, enter

pine

at the Eniac command prompt.

Follow the directions to configure Pine to read your SEAS email. For documentation on using Pine, see: http://www.washington.edu/pine/tutorial.4

Other Mail Clients

If your mail client is not listed above, you can the general mail settings to setup your client.