Mailbox is the new Queens College Secure Webmail program. It allows you to access your Queens College e-mail via the web, using a web browser such as Netscape 6 or Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. Older browsers may work but are not supported.

Mailbox uses the same technology that commercial internet sites (such as Amazon and eBay) use to protect credit card numbers to protect your user name, password and e-mail messages from eavesdroppers during transmission.

Mailman is the Queens College Mailing List Server. Although Mailman and Mailbox both operate from the same physical computer system and share the same introductory web page, mailbox.qc.edu, they are entirely different services. Mailman is the Queens College Mailing List Server and Mailbox is the Queens College Secure Webmail Server.

Please see the Mailman FAQ for more information if you are curious.

Webmail is an older, alternative service also offered by Queens College. The vendor of the webmail software running on webmail.qc.edu has ceased development of this product. However, to accomodate users who have become familiar with the webmail interface, we will continue to run this software as long as it remains viable.

The principal advantage is that Mailbox has built-in support for several languages such as Spanish, Russian, German, Chinese and Korean (see the drop-down menu for complete list). Academically, foreign-language teachers can use this feature to communicate in the language being studied. Personally, foreign-born students can use it to communicate in their native tongue.

The other major advantage is security. When you read your QC e-mail on campus, your transmissions are protected by the switched network's infrastructure. Off-campus, however, you are theoretically subject to eavesdropping. Mailbox encrypts transmissions between itself and your web browser so that it is virtually impossible for a hacker to interpret what is being sent.

The advantage Mailbox has over PMAIL and Eudora is that when you are away from your home, office/campus, and/or laptop you can still read your mail on another computer because you do not have to have either PMAIL or Eudora installed on that computer. All you need is an Internet connection and a web browser.

Mailbox currently supports accounts on Forbin, QCUNIX1, QC1, Vanguard, Troll, and CSJava.

No. Mailbox is for use with official Queens College accounts only.

Yes. Forbin and QCUNIX1 provide you IMAP access to your account, whereas QC1 and Vanguard provide only POP access. You can achieve IMAP access to QC1 and Vanguard using the "Mailman" server listed on Mailbox's front page, but this option is very slow.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) has replaced POP (Post Office Protocol) as the standard method for retrieving e-mail across the Internet. There are numerous differences between the two protocols, but the key ones are these:

• POP adversely affects your mail quota. Every time you POP your mail, the POP software makes a duplicate of your inbox. This means that you must fill less than half of your quota in order to be able to POP your e-mail. IMAP does not perform this copy, and thus does not impose this restriction.
• IMAP allows you to store your mail in separate folders on the server. Not only does this allow you to organize your mail but since the mail is on the server, you can access it from home or on-campus; whereas POP forces you to download it to the computer you're using at the time -- but if you download it to your home computer, you can't get to it from on-campus, and vice versa. Although you can tell POP to leave your mail in the INBOX (on the server), you then begin to flirt with quota limitations. With IMAP, non-INBOX folders are kept in your home directory which has a larger (separate) quota, thereby giving you more effective storage space for your mail.
• IMAP is much faster than POP

The image of a face in the left-hand column of an entry in the mailbox index view means that that message was sent directly to you, and not Cc'd to you or sent via a mailing list. In other words, your address appears in the To: header.

Mailbox shows the recipient in the From column on messages for which you are the sender. (In other words, since you sent it, you know who the sender is, so Mailbox tells you who you sent it to.) This is particularly useful for the sent-mail and drafts folders.

You may be presented, when you click on the Folders link in Mailbox's menu, with a list of mailboxes to which you can subscribe (and unsubscribe). Since it is possible to have a very large number of mail folders in your account but not actively use all of the folders -- the others, for instance, being archives of old mail -- Mailbox allows you to specify which folders you wish to be able to access in Mailbox. Subscribing to a folder makes it appear in the lists of folders to which you can copy, move, and save messages and for which you can display a message index.

Mailbox can work in two modes: marking mail as deleted, and moving deleted messages to a Trash folder. In the first mode, when you tell Mailbox to delete one one or more messages (by clicking Delete in the message view, or by selecting the check box to the left of the message in the mailbox index view and then clicking Delete), the mail is only marked as deleted, and is not immediately removed from your mailbox, giving you the opportunity to decide to undelete it. If you are certain you will not need the deleted message(s), click on Purge Deleted in the mailbox index view. If you only wish to make Mailbox stop displaying the deleted messages, without permanently removing them, click Hide Deleted from the mailbox index view.

If you are using the Trash folder feature, it acts somewhat differently. When you tell Mailbox to delete one or more messages (by clicking Delete in the message view, or by selecting the check box to the left of the message in the mailbox index view and then clicking Delete), the mail is moved to a Trash folder, giving you the opportunity to decide to undelete it (remove it from the trash) later. If you are certain you will not need the deleted message(s), click on Empty Trash folder in the mailbox index view. In addition, you can have Mailbox schedule to automatically empty your trash folder at various intervals via the "Maintainence Operations" section of Options.

To send mail to more than one person, separate their email addresses in the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: header (or a combination of all three) with commas (","). Do not use semicolons (";") to separate lists of email addresses.

Instead of opening the Address book window, you can save time when sending mail to people in your Address book by typing their name, or part of their name, in the appropriate header field in the Compose window itself and the using the Compose window's Expand Names button to expand the name to the full address. If multiple Address book entries match, you will be given a selection list of all the matching entries from which you may select the desired address.

Full support for multiple addresses is still forthcoming. But in most cases you can store multiple addresses in a single Address book entry simply by listing all the email addresses in the Address book Email field separated by commas. Do not use semicolons (";") to separate lists of email addresses.

Note that the number of addresses that fit in a single entry may be limited.

Due to the nature of Web-based mail, attaching a file to a message you are about to send is slightly different than what you may be accustomed to in conventional mail programs. Attaching a file requires two steps. While composing the message:

1. Type the filename in the Attachment field, or press the Browse button to use a dialog box to choose the file to attach.
2. Press the Attach button to attach the selected file. This may take a moment as the file is copied from your computer to the server on which you access Mailbox.

Attachments can be a maximum of 8 MB. We reserve the right to change this limit at any point; in addition, your own quota may create further restrictions on this number.

To see the entire message header, click the Message Source link in the Parts section of the message view. This will show you the raw mail message in the mailbox, including full headers and any attachments in encoded form.

Limited support for filtering and blocking of messages within Mailbox is supported.

If you want to filter future messages from the same person as the message you are currently using, use the Blacklist link when in the message view. This will add a rule to filter out that sender, and take you to the Filter Rules Options page.

For more general filtering, select the Options menu item in Mailbox, and then select Filters from the Mail Management section.

Note that creating a rule does not filter any messages! You must click the Apply All Rules button on the Filter Rules page or the "Apply Filters" icon next to the INBOX name in the mailbox view to filter all undeleted messages according to the specified rules. You can set up filter options to apply your filter rules at login and/or when the mailbox is refreshed.

You can also create, remove, or arrange the order of rules from the Filters Rules page. Note that rules are applied once per message, hence rule order is significant. Make sure you have the most important rules first.

This is an artifact of the IMAP server, from which Mailbox retrieves your messages. The message can be ignored.

You can request a return receipt by clicking the "Request a Return Receipt" checkbox in the message composition screen. Whether or not you will get a confirmation back depends on many factors outside of our control. For example, some destination mail servers will remove return receipt requests from mail before it reaches the recipient, and some mail clients will allow the user to select if return receipts should be honored. Because of these and other factors, you should not depend on return receipts being honored by all recipients.

You can configure this via the Options link in the Mailbox menu bar. From Options select New Mail (from the "Other Options" area), then check the checkbox labeled "Display pop-up notification of new mail."

You can undelete messages any time up until you click on the Empty Trash or Purge Deleted buttons, or until any automated emptying of the trash occurs if you have set up such an option. To undelete messages (marked as deleted) from the inbox listing, check the checkbox to the left of the messages you wish to keep, then press the Undelete link at the top or bottom left of the page. When you are viewing a message marked for deletion, there will be a link at the start and end of the message to undelete that message. If you are using a Trash folder, you can undelete the messages by moving them out of the Trash folder into another folder.

This answer strongly depends on the operating system you are using. This response is broken into different sections for Mac and the different versions of Windows, and Linux.

Windows 98/Me: From the control panel go to Add/Remove Programs. Select Windows Setup, click on Multilanguage Support, click the Details button. Select the language support of your choice from this menu and click OK from this and from the previous menu. You will be asked to reboot. After reboot, from the control panel, select Keyboard, select the Language tab and click the Add button, choose your language from the list and click OK. Check the box next to Enable indicator on taskbar. You can now switch languages by clicking on your new taskbar icon.

Windows 2000: In the control panel, double-click the Regional Options icon, select the General tab and under Language Settings for the System select your language. Again in the control panel, double-click Keyboard, select the Input Locales tab, click the add button, choose your language from the list and click OK. Check the box next to Enable indicator on taskbar. You can now switch languages by clicking on your new taskbar icon.

Windows XP: In the control panel, double-click the Regional and Language Options icon, select Languages, inside Text Services and Input Languages choose Details, inside Installed Services click Add, and choose your language. You can now switch languages by clicking on your new taskbar icon.

Mac OS X 10.1 and above: OS X automatically displays different character sets as long as you have installed fonts which can support those languages; however, you still must configure your system to be able to enter text in that character set. From System Preferences, select International . Select the Input Menu tab. Add a check next to any language in which you wish to be able to type. After you quit System Preferences, you will be able to choose your keyboard language from the drop-down menu that now appears on the top menu bar on your screen.

Linux: Linux support depends strongly on which window manager (and which version of that window manager you are using), but internationalization is now well-supported (and well-documented) under both KDE and GNOME. Check your local system documentation for instructions.