HMC Mathematics Computing Weblog

The time has come to switch off non-SSL mail service, and I will do so on October 22, 2010. Using SSL protects your password (and the security of our systems) as well as your mail. We currently allow non-SSL IMAP and POP connections, but there are only a couple of people using non-SSL IMAP and all the non-SSL POP connections appear to come from Google's GMail, which supports SSL.

If you're not sure whether you're using SSL or not, check your e-mail account settings. If you have a "use SSL" checkbox and it's checked, you're good. You can also check to be sure that you're using port 465 for SMTP (outgoing mail); port 993 for IMAP; or port 995 for POP.

While you're checking your settings, if you're still using esme.math.hmc.edu as your SMTP server, you should switch to use mail.math.hmc.edu instead. esme will be going away at some point as we migrate services to other machines; switching now ensure that you'll still be able to send mail when we shut down SMTP service on esme!

And if you're using POP, which pulls the messages off the server and maintains them on the machine you pull to, you might consider using IMAP, which leaves your mail on our server instead. IMAP is especially useful if you access your mail from several locations (e.g., a desktop machine, a laptop, a phone). POP is good if you just want to pull your mail off our server into another mail client (and is the only option that GMail supports for retrieving messages from other systems).

More details about configuring your mail clients to work with your HMC Mathematics Department accounts is available from http://www.math.hmc.edu/computing/support/email/.