At CERN, e-mail is one of the most popular IT services. There exist over 15,000 users sending over 80,000 messages every day. E-mail covers a wide range of needs, which go from the simple greetings to the coordination of activities such as seminars and conferences.

The outgoing mail servers at CERN are the servers behind the general name smtp.cern.ch. These servers do not require user authentification, but only users within the CERN domain are accepted (the rest get a relaying error). The core details can be found here. In addition, CERN invests a big deal of time in Spam fighting, the policy can be found here. It is also worth mentioning the fact that the SMTP servers won't let through any attachment with any of the extenssions filtered out by the Outlook mail client program (.exe, .bat, amongs some others). Users willing to send such files need to zip them first, keeping in mind that no attachment bigger than 5Mb will make its way to the destination.

There are several machines acting as IMAP/POP3 e-mail servers (the so called incoming mail boxes). Each machine hosts a number of accounts. New machines are purchased and setup to host new accounts as needed. The accounts hosted in the older machines are migrated to the newer ones. All this being transparent to the users. People leaving CERN may keep the e-mail account for a term of two months, although this term is quite flexible.
Users can send and fetch e-mail and news by using CERN's recommended clients.

User accounts are of the type Firstname.Familyname@cern.ch e.g. Miguel.Arregui@cern.ch. This is achieved by letting each user have a physical e-mail address (PEM) in the Computer Center Database (CCDB) pointing to both userid and mail server (where the account is hosted), which conform the actual user's physical e-mail box. Every user has also the generical e-mail address (GEM), which is an easier to remember "alias" of the PEM. The PEM can be changed by the users themselves via the xuserinfo or the phonebook tools. The GEM should never be changed. The core aspects of this can be found here.

Physical e-mail boxes are spread into two partitions serverwise. One used as the INBOX container, being limitless. The other one used as a the user's folders container, limited up to 10Mb, which in very special cases could be increased, if the user proves the need. For these very special cases a mail must be written to the Helpdesk explaining the reasons. If the need is evident, then 10Mb of aditional quota will be granted. The default 10Mb are intended to be used as a temporal container for very important mails that the user may need in a short term. These 10Mb are not intended to be used as a container for all the mail the user wants to keep "just in case". These measures are there to avoid long synchronization waits, since the default configuration for mail fetching uses the IMAP protocol and this protocol downloads all user's mail headers upon start up.
The INBOX partition can be found in  /homedir/Initial/UserLogin e.g. /homedir/m/marregui, and besides the inbox folder, it contains too a link to the folder's partition (the other one). The folder's partition can be found in  /folders/Initial/UserLogin e.g. /folders/m/marregui.
Users can access their e-mail accounts by doing a telnet connection to UserLogin.mailbox.cern.ch e.g. marregui.mailbox.cern.ch. Once connected, the users are provided with a very rescrictive environment and a set of tools which documentation can be found  in this link. Less advanced users can have access to these tools in a more simple way by visiting https://mailwww.cern.ch/sindex.html.

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This web site has been created by Miguel Arregui , Monica Moles, Bienve Vidal, Sonia Reventun and Miguel Angel Aliaga.
Last update October 22, 2001