Email Calmail Settings

Configure your CalMail Math account name

In order to use Calmail Math account, you need to remember that your Calmail user name username@math.berkeley.edu includes your Math login name and @math.berkeley.edu. Also the server to which you should connect is calmail.berkeley.edu.

Calmail Instructions

There are instructions for many email clients on the UCB knowledge base.

A potential problem

The default web browser client for CalMail is SquirrelMail. The default language in SquirrelMail is English. With that default setting the text messages you compose will have

Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1

in their header irrespective of whether your message or a portion of it may contain higher Unicode glyphs (e.g., Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew,...). This will cause a number of mail clients to display your message incorrectly, including SquirrelMail itself which will display your message in the Sent folder filled with garbage HTML macros for each higher Unicode glyph you entered.

Solution

Change your language in Options > Language to any language but English (e.g., to British, Polish, Russian,...). Now all your text messages will be sent with the directive

Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8

which ensures that basically any mail client will display the text of your message correctly, including CalMail's own SquirrelMail that will now correctly display your message in the Sent folder.

Changing the default language English to any other language in Options thus ensures that your messages are sent with the UTF-8 charset being mentioned in the Content-Type directive. It also changes the text on several labels and menu items in the SquirrelMail window to that language, unless your switch is from English to British.

An alternative is to use RoundCube mail client (the link provided on the CalMail web page). RoundCube sends all your plain text messages with

Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8

whether your selected language is English (the default), or any other one.

Note that in the RoundCube the default mode when you compose a message is HTML mark-up, but you can always switch to the plain text mode by pressing the corresponding button in the Compose window.

Local Instructions

We also have local documentation for some clients.

Apple's Mail client

Our local documentation is here and there is also some Calmail information here.

Thunderbird

See our Calmail Thunderbird page; the Calmail knowledge base information is here.

pine/alpine

The Calmail alpine page contains rudimentary documentation.

mutt

Here is a page on using mutt with Calmail .

--Steve Sizemore - Unix System Manager 16:19, 19 March 2009 (UTC)