By default, outgoing mail has a return address username@nmsu.edu. If people reply to this, it gets received at the NMSU, not the department, level. It is possible to read your NMSU email using the my.nmsu.edu interface, but almost everybody in the department chooses to have the NMSU email forwarded to the Astronomy cluster. This is accomplished by going to http://my.nmsu.edu, go into the email preferences configuration, and have all of your email forwarded to username@astronomy.nmsu.edu.
Of course, you can also set forwarding to some alternate personal address if you prefer. If you receive your email somewhere other than the astronomy cluster, then you should also set things up so that any email that happens to be sent directly to the astronomy cluster gets forwarded to your preferred address. This can be accomplished by placing a .forward file in your home directoy which contains a single line with the email address to which you wish to have your local mail forwarded.
In any case, it is wise to set things up so that all of your email ends up in one place, so you will be sure not to miss anything!
Once mail is delivered to our server, mail can be seen from any of the Linux machines; you do not need to log onto the Linux server to read it.
Many mail clients are available; some of the most commonly used ones are netscape/mozilla/thunderbird (various versions of a similar package), pine (text-based), the MH suite (text and graphical interfaces), plus others. If you don't have a strong preference, we recommend you use netscape/mozilla/thunderbird. We also have a web interface for reading mail.
If you use a mail client, the server (astronomy) is set up to be either an IMAP or a POP server; we recommend using IMAP as it is more powerful (it allows you to manipulated mail directly on the server instead of just locally on your machine). The server name, both for incoming and outgoing mail, is astronomy.nmsu.edu
You can also access your email via our internal webmail interface; this will work seamlessly with any mail client that uses the IMAP protocol. You can use this by going to http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/webmail
You do need to be careful about only using one tool to access mail at a given time; if two different tools are being run (e.g., webmail and a mail client), you may not see all of your messages on each.
Whatever mail tool you use, we prefer that you create folders for filing your mail; if you leave everything in your inbox, it clutters up our mail spooling disk.
Current email lists for subsets of the Astronomy department, as well as the entire department are kept fairly up to date. You can use these by sending email to listname@astronomy.nmsu.edu, where listname is one of the following:
The exact contents of the list can be viewed here. Although some effort is made to keep the lists up to date, please contact Jon if modifications/additions/deletions need to be made to the list.