How to Deal (or Not Deal) with E-mail While You Are Away from Rutgers

People who leave Rutgers for long periods of time may return to find their Inboxes filled with e-mail. Worse, they may find that the volume of mail has caused their account to reach its quota limit in their absence, and messages have been rejected and returned to their senders for want of space to accept them.

Here are some things you can do to prepare your e-mail account for a long absence. While some of the material may apply to any e-mail account or mail reader, these instructions are meant for account holders on New Brunswick Computing Services' systems. People with accounts on other Rutgers systems should check with their local support staff to see equivalent services are available.

• If you are a member of a mailing list, ask the list owner if a "NOMAIL" option is available for the list. This leaves your e-mail address as a member of the list but suspends delivery to it. Many lists keep archives of the mail sent to them, so also ask if your list has such an archive, and how to access it, if when you return you want to read the messages sent in your absence.
  
  If there is no such option, consider unsubscribing from the list and resubscribing on your return, although this is a more drastic choice.
   
• If your account is on RCI or Eden, set the spam filter so that it saves spam into an AUTO-DELETED-SPAM folder. Every night, we delete from that folder any message that is over two weeks old. This keeps spam from building up and up while you're away. You can set up the spam filter by going to the webmail.rutgers.edu page, selecting the RCI or Eden webmail program, logging in, and clicking the Webtools link, where you'll find a link for "spam filtering". There are instructions there for its use. Note that other web-based mail programs that may also access your RCI or Eden account (such as those on my.rutgers.edu or rulink.rutgers.edu) do not have access to this spam filter.
   
• While you are in webmail, use the vacation webtool to set a vacation message. Click on the Webtools link again and select "vacation message". This is an automatic reply to mail you receive and will alert your regular correspondents to your absence, so that they might not send the volume of mail they usually do. You can accept the default message or replace it with one of your own. For example, the message can give your correspondents an alternate address in your department for someone who can answer some questions while you're away.
  
  The vacation tool also keeps track of the e-mail addresses it replies to and will only send each address one copy of the automatic reply within a two-week period. After two weeks have passed, if another message from this address is received, another copy of the message is sent and the address remembered for another two weeks, and so on. Keep this in mind if you want to test the vacation message by sending yourself a message from another account. Once you receive an automatic reply, you will have to turn the vacation message off, and back on again, in webmail to allow that address to receive another automatic reply.
   
• In anticipation of leaving, make as much room as you can on your account for new mail. Go through your saved mail and eliminate messages you no longer need. Good candidates for deletion are messages about events that have passed and messages with attachments which have already been downloaded to the desktop (and where the accompanying text is not needed).
  
  Remember that accounts are also used for files other than mail (such as old web pages, data and programs, and so on). Connect through an SSH program, or the Weeble file manager web tool (available on both RCI and Eden), and delete other such unneeded files. 

On your return, make sure you log into webmail again and turn off the vacation program. Since the purpose of the AUTO-DELETED-SPAM folder in the spam filter is to catch any "false positives" -- legitimate messages the filter thinks are spam -- also review what's in that folder and move any legitimate mail into other folders. (If you see a lot of legitimate mail there, you have the spam filter set too low. Move it up one level and see if that allows all your legitimate mail to be delivered while still catching a majority of the spam. (No program will catch all spam while allowing all legitimate mail through, so you have to find a balance with which you are comfortable.)  

If you are going somewhere where you will at least have access to the World Wide Web, you might also consider going to the webmail site every so often and and checking over your mail quickly, deleting things you know you don't need and rescuing good mail from the AUTO-DELETED-SPAM folder (and adjusting the spam filter, if needed). You can leave other messages in your Inbox for your return. If you delete anything in webmail, make sure you also click the "(Purge)" link next to the Trash folder, which will actually erase the deleted mail and free up the space on your account.

If you have questions, please call our Help Desk at 732-445-HELP (4357) or write to help@eden.rutgers.edu (for Eden accounts) or help@rci.rutgers.edu (for RCI accounts).