EMail Delivery and Filtering

Email at UMBC is out of necessity somewhat complicated, we support over 15000 email users and process almost 300,000 mail messages a week;but at the same time quite flexible. It consist of two distinct parts -- the first is our directory service, which can provide email re-direction of your "@umbc.edu" email address to any valid Internet e-mail address. This directory service also allows for "full name" addressing of email, such as robert_banz@umbc.edu. In addition to simplifying your email address while at UMBC, your @umbc.edu directory entry will remain in place for at least a two years after your last registered class or employment at UMBC, allowing your mail to forwarded to your new address. (just remember to set it before you leave! :) )

The second portion of mail delivery at UMBC consists of the local mail delivery system. For accounts that are part of our unified computing environment (AFS Home Directories, etc), the @umbc.edu email field should be set to "username@gl.umbc.edu" or "username@afs.umbc.edu". UMBC7 accounts for faculty/staff, created before summer 2001, should be set to "username@research.umbc.edu". Regardless of the setting of this field, the "preferred" email address at umbc is still username@umbc.edu.

Your @umbc.edu Address

For information and help on understand and modifying your @umbc.edu address. Please see our page on @umbc.edu Setup.

Querying and changing your @umbc.edu email address

Modifying the location your @umbc.edu mail is sent to has now been integrated into the Webadmin interface. First go to https://webadmin.umbc.edu/admin/acct/edit. If you haven't authenticated yet, you'll be required to do so. Once you've gotten in, you'll need to click on your username. From there you can modify your "Mail Destination". This is the location that mail sent to "username@umbc.edu" will be sent to. This is normally something like "username@gl.umbc.edu" or "username@research.umbc.edu". Once you've changed the field, you'll have to click the "Change Entry!" button at the bottom.

Configuring Your Mail Delivery and Filtering

For users having their mail delivered to @afs.umbc.edu or @gl.umbc.edu, it is possible to configure your account automatically sort your mail, or discard unwanted mail, via our local delivery agent, procmail. For general information on procmail, you may wish to visit these URLs:

• Setting up a Vacation message
  A page from our Helpdesk on how to setup a vacation message
• UMBC Anti-Spam Procmail filters
  Includes information on eliminating common pieces of spam
• The Procmail FAQ
  Includes links to other documentation and tutorials
• A procmail tutorial written by a UMBC student
  A little out of date, but still very good!

Local Configuration Notes

Please keep in mind, when reading these pieces of externally developed documentation, that some local configurations have been made to procmail in response to certain ease-of-use, security, and performance concerns.

• Procmail is the local delivery agent
  It is unnecessary, as noted in some documentation, to place procmail in your ".forward" file, and in some instances, it will not work.
• no ~/.forward, but use ~/../Mail/.forward
  For users with AFS home directories, your .forward file is not in $HOME/.forward, but in $HOME/../Mail/.forward.
• Delivery to "applications" is restricted
  Due to security and performance concerns for the mail delivery machines, delivery from procmail to "pipes" is restricted to specific applications. Currently, these are:
  • procmail - yes, you can recursively deliver to procmail
  • filter - the elm filtering program
  • vacation - for responding to vacation messages
• Procmail cannot read or write to files outside of your Mail directory
  Also, for security and data integrity issues, procmail will refuse to access files outside of your home volume. By default, the access controls on your home volume only allow the delivery system to access your Mail directory.
• It is unnessary to set MAILDIR or DEFAULT in your .procmailrc
  Though most procmail documentation refers to setting these variables, rest assured that the UMBC mail delivery system sets these correctly by default to your Mail directory, and you Mail/inbox folder respectively. Do not set these unless you really know what you're doing.