Electronic Mail at RZG
Addresses
Every RZG user has an email address of the form firstname.lastname@rzg.mpg.de
Users of IPP and MPQ may also use @ipp.mpg.de or @mpq.mpg.de
Note that email addresses are not case sensitive
Central Mail Exchanger and Configuration of your Mail Client
The RZG runs a central mail exchanger which
handles all incoming and outgoing e-mail.
Please configure mailhost.rzg.mpg.de as your SMTP and POP/IMAP server.
The standard ports for pop (110) and imap(143) and their secure counterparts (995, 993) running over SSL are supported.
If you cannot use your own client there is also a webmail interface accessible via the userspace.
Sending Mail from Offsite
If you want to send email from offsite via our mail server you have to authenticate yourself using TLS or SSL. Please see here how to configure your client for that.
Installing the Root Certificate
If your email complains about the server's certificate you need to install the cerfificate of "Deutsche Telekom Root CA 2". For details see here.
Spam and Malware
Each email arriving from the outside is examined automatically by two different virus scanner programs. If a virus or other malware is found, the email is quarantined and a note is sent to you instead.
In addition, the likelyness of each mail to be spam is rated and a
new header line included.
To protect yourself from spam, you may take the following measures:
- Reducing Spam by Greylisting:
The amount of spam can be much reduced by enabling "Greylisting" for your account. If enabled, every mail from an unknown sender will be rejected with a temporary failure code. For legitimate mail, the sender's mailserver will retry after a few minutes and we will then accept the message. Future mails from the same sender will be accepted without delay.
On the other hand the spam senders' software usually doesn't bother to retry a temporarily failed delivery attempt.
In rare cases the greylisting mechanism may fail with legn yitimate mail.
You can enable greylisting for your account in your userspace. - Instead or in addition you can configure your email client to sort out spam using the spam rating we provide. See here for further details
- By common request it is also possible to delete incoming emails automatically when they exceed a configurable "spamynes" as soon as they arrive. These mails will be dropped without notice and there is no way to recover them. You can configure that in your userspace, but we do not recommend to use this feature.
Other things you may configure on the server side
- If you activate the "vacation" facility the mail server will automatically reply to incoming messages to inform the sender that you are away from office. The mechanism keeps track to whom it already sent a message. Vacation replies are only sent once per week per sender. So don't be surprised if it seems to work only once when testing it. Messages are not sent to (correctly configured) mailing lists.
- In addition (or instead) you may forward all incoming emails to another person , or only mails from certain senders or only mails with a specified keyword in the subject.
Some important notes
Never try to access your mailbox with different mail-clients at the same time since this may lead to inconsistencies.
Please move emails that you want to keep to other folders, don't leave them in the INBOX. Mails on the INBOX that are older than half a year will be deleted.
.forward files in AFS are not honoured any more.
Don't send mail to spammail@rzg.mpg.de or spammail@ipp.mpg.de
