NOTE: IMSS also offers Exchange email & calendar service for managing email, calendar, contacts, tasks and other data in one integrated system. Please see IMSS Exchange Service Overview for more information.
Choices for Accessing Standard IMSS Email
IMSS offers a Standard Email Service for convenient, secure access to email. The service supports a variety of secure local and remote access methods including desktop email clients via POP and IMAP protocols (e.g. Outlook, Entourage, Eudora, Thunderbird, MozillaMail, Pine, Mutt), and browser-based webmail. The standard email service is hosted on clustered systems to maximize system availability and performance.
IMSS Standard Email Service is available at no charge for current Caltech students, staff, postdocs, faculty, and retirees, and Caltech organizational groups, clubs, classes, as well as officially-registered Caltech volunteers.
Note: if you wish to use more than one email program with the Standard IMSS Email Service, IMSS recommends you configure your email programs to use IMAP rather than POP.
Choices for Accessing Standard IMSS Email (start here)
IMSS users can now access their email via IMAP-based Webmail from any computer connected to the Internet, using a common web browser.
IMSS users may configure their desktop email programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Mail to use the IMAP protocol to access their email.
If IMSS users choose not to use IMAP, IMSS users may configure their desktop email programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Mail to use the POP protocol to access their email.
Email configuration guides for accessing POP or IMAP email with Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Entourage, Eudora, Netscape Mail, Mutt, and Pine.
Additional Features of Standard IMSS Email Services
Server-Side Email Filtering Service
Dealing with Spam and Other Junk Email
Mail Spool Quota and Limitations on Message Size and Attachments
Sending Email to Everyone at Caltech
We often get questions from users about what they should print on their Caltech business cards.
Instead of using your IMSS account for email, you can set your account to forward all inbound email to another account elsewhere. Also, if you put such forwarding in place prior to the deletion of your account, when your account is deleted from our systems, we continue the forwarding until one year after the account deletion date.
Using our web-based setup system you can have the IMSS mail server do things like throw away unwanted mail, forward it to other addresses based on IMSS contents, or file it into folders accessible with our IMAP server or webmail system.
If you are away from your IMSS email, you can set up an auto-responder to reply to inbound email in your absence. Many of our users take advantage of this service during their vacations.
IMSS runs a virus scanner as part of our email system. If our system identifies a message as carrying a virus, it is quarantined in a special place and you are notified so that you can choose whether or not to access the message.
Our recommended courses of action regarding unsolicited commercial email, offensive email, forged email, dealing with harassment, is to block email from specific sender's addresses.
IMSS runs an automated program as part of our email system which flags messages likely to be unsolicited commercial email (spam). You can configure your email program to filter messages with that flag into a separate spam folder, to reduce the number of spurious messages in your inbox every day.
If you have an account on a system other than the IMSS computer systems, but want an email address @caltech.edu to forward to that account, an alias can provide that without having a full-fledged IMSS account.
For instance, if John Smith read his email at his account jsmith@business.caltech.edu but wanted to be able to print john.smith@caltech.edu as his address on his business cards, he could request john.smith as an @caltech.edu alias pointing to jsmith@business.caltech.edu.
IMSS provides centralized addressbook services for use with most email programs in use across campus. Here's how that works, how to configure your client to use them, and how to report errors in the addressbook.
Note that you can use the IMSS-maintained Global Address Lists with your current mail client software without using an IMSS account for your email.
Information for accountholders on the IMSS computer systems and anyone else sending email to any @caltech.edu addresses.
IMSS now uses mailing list management software called Mailman. Subscription, unsubscription, and list administration are done using a web-based interface. The list owner has complete control of their list. This allows the owner to change their list preferences whenever they desire and eliminates the need to contact IMSS for list changes. Messages marked as spam by IMSS' Spam Flagging Service are automatically discarded or put into a queue for the moderator/owner to approve or delete. Users should see much less spam as a result.
Frequently asked questions about Mailman mailing lists at IMSS.
To notify large groups, or everyone, at Caltech about something, there are a few different services you can use.