Setup of Traditional E-mail Clients

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SUNY Owned Computers

The CTS Helpdesk configures all SUNY owned computers to use either Mozilla's Thunderbird or Apple's Mail program. Currently, these are the only two email programs supported by the Helpdesk for College owned computers. The CTS Helpdesk only supports students using our webmail client, BearMail.

Requirements

These instructions are platform/operating system independent. The only requirement is that your email client software support the IMAP mail protocol. Thunderbird, Apple's Mail.app, and Outlook Express all are IMAP compliant.

Setup

IMAP Configuration

  • Your incoming mail (IMAP) server should be imap.potsdam.edu. 
  • Use Port 993 with SSL enabled. 
  • Some IMAP servers have a leading mailbox space name. This setting is called slightly different things depending on your client. For example, Thunderbird calls it "IMAP Server Directory" and Apple's Mail program calls it "Mailbox Path Prefix." For this setting enter INBOX 
  • Your return address should be username@potsdam.edu where 'username' is your SUNY Potsdam E-mail account name (e.g. doe99). 

SMTP Server

  • The outgoing server is: smtp.potsdam.edu 
  • Use port: 465 
  • For security we use SMTP-Auth over SSL and your CCA is your username and password for the send mail server. 

Limitations:

Return Receipt: Some email clients support a feature called "return receipt". When a supported email client receives the email sent, an automatic reply is emailed back to the sender indicating the message was received. Many web based email clients and several traditional email clients do not support this! Further, the clients that do have this as an option require that it be enabled as it is "off" by default. Return receipts are not a reliable means to determine that a message was received and should not be trusted!

Suggestions:

If you use email client software that supports multiple email accounts such as Mail.app or Thunderbird and you plan to make use of both your non-SUNY Potsdam address and your SUNY Potsdam address you might want to configure a message rule for each account so that mail will be delivered in separate mailboxes to easily tell which account they came from. You should consult the documentation for your email client software on how to do this.