Receiving class listserv e-mail at an account not on the campus unix system

It may be that you have an account off-campus, or elsewhere on campus, at which you would prefer to receive your listserv e-mail, rather than on the account you have on the campus-wide unix system (with the domain ksu.edu). 

This can be arranged, but before you request that I do so, please consider the following.

• The only e-mail address that people who want to reach you will find when they consult the KSU White Pages on the Web is your account @ksu.edu .  If you have not formed the habit of regularly checking the e-mail that arrives at this account, you will not get the messages sent there.  These include messages that instructors may send to you individually, asking you to clarify a point made in some assignment or to make an appointment for a conference or to discuss a grade.  Unless I happen to be replying to a messge you have sent me, the only way I have of contacting you personally by e-mail is via these White Pages.

There is a way for you to have your mail automatically forwarded from your campus account, but even this requires you to login to your account and make the proper command.  See below.

• Although more and more activity over the internet is going to be able to be done via a web browser, it still pays you to know how to access an e-mail account through a unix window.  Believe it or not, it may turn out that you need to access your e-mail from some computer that only allows telnet access to the internet.  As a part of your basic comuter literacy in the modern world, it would be well for you to know how to do this. 

Here's how for Windows95 machines.

• Of course if you're working in a KSU public computer lab, just go to the Start button and pick Unix.  Then login and read your mail.

Using unix is easy.  The commands you'll need for basic things are simple.  See Getting Started with your K-State Unix Account.

• One advantage to using your campus account is that you can keep all of your academic mail in one place, sorted into directories under Pinemail.  It's a very flexible utility, and easy to learn.  So even if you want to manage your recreational mail from some other site, you might still decide to actively use your campus account.

You might want to bookmark or print off a copy of the useful page on tips for using Pinemail. 

• If you are going to put up a personal web page at KSU, you'll need to be able to do things on your unix account.

See the instructions on Creating Your Own Web Page.

If you insist on using some other account for your course-related listserv e-mail, I will need to alter the mailing list for our course so that it will send our listserv mail to the outside address you prefer and so that the listserv will accept mail you send (by replying to a message, or on your own initiative, to pose a question or make a comment).  This is because the lists are compiled automatically from enrollment information, which connects your name to your student-number and that in turn to the account on the campus-wide system you have been automatically assigned!

Send an e-mail message to me at lyman@ksu.edu asking me to change your address on the class listserv mailing list.  In your message, you must include the following information.

• The course you are enrolled in (so I don't guess wrong and end up adding you to the list for one of the other courses I'm teaching!)
• The e-mail address you want dropped from the list (e.g., the one on the campus-wide unix system, ending in @ksu.edu).
• The e-mail address you want to have your mail sent to instead.

You should soon receive a notification at both accounts of the changes that I have caused to be made.

CAUTION:  If you are not going to regularly check your e-mail on your campus account, you still need to arrange to have any mail sent there to be forwarded to the account wherever you do regularly read your mail.  Otherwise you will never get messages that people sent you privately on the basis of the address they found in the Campus White Pages on the Web.  This will include messages from me to you individually, as opposed to via the listserv.  Unless I am replying to a message you have sent me, there is no way I can find an address to send e-mail for you except in the campus web White Pages, since listserv mailing lists at present return to the "owner" only addresses and not names.

Here's how to have your mail forwarded:

1. Login to your campus account (e.g., from any public computer lab on campus).
2. Remember to hit Enter as the first thing you do when the system prompt appears (it ends in %).
3. Enter the following command:  forward new-id@new-place, where new-id is the id you have at the account you want your mail forwarded to and new-place is the domain where that account resides (e.g., hotmail.com or networksplus.net).  [If you make a typing mistake, you'll need to use Shift-BackArrow, not just BackArrow to back up.]
4. If you ever want to cancel this forwarding, the command to enter is forward -reset .

  Go to the Home Page of the course.

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 1999 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

      This page last updated 12 January 2000.