The EE Systems group encourages the use of Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. It is an easy-to-use, feature-rich email program that runs and performs consistently on every type of system. Thunderbird implements the open standards comprising a modern email system in an elegant and efficient manner. It offers a greater level of protection against email-bourne viruses than Outlook or Outlook Express. Best of all, it is free of charge and enjoys a wide user and development community.

Thunderbird is the email client taken from the Mozilla Suite of Internet programs. You can still use Mozilla as your email client, as well as its derivatives, such as Netscape. For the most part, Thunderbird and the email programs included in both Mozilla or Netscape are functionally identical to one another.

Outlook and Outlook Express are popular but are designed to work with Microsoft's Exchange Server. They have an inefficient IMAP implementation that produces trivial but annoying error messages. This is an example of a vendor purposely including a bug in an application in order to dissuade people from using software built around open, published standards. Entourage for OS X suffers from even more problems than this and is a generally a disappointment. However, OS X has an excellent mail application that performs very well with the EE mail system. We recommend it for Mac users although Thunderbird for Mac is still an attractive option as well.

EE Email Server Settings

Configuring Email Services (POP/IMAP/SMTP)

The EE department makes use of secure (encrypted) mail services which requires that you configure your email client to use SSL for both incoming and outgoing mail services. Please see the following two links for more information about configuring your email program to use the EE email services.

Using EE Web Mail

The EE department maintains a secure, Web-based email system. This service allows you to use your EE email account anywhere that you have access to an internet connection and a Web browser. The Web-based email system uses encryption to provide a secure connection to the EE Department mail server, regardless of where you use it.

PINE Users

If you enjoy using Pine as your email client, you can access certain EE Departmental Unix systems in order to read your email. Please send an email to trouble AT ee.columbia.edu in order to find out the hostnames of the machines that you are allowed to access.

Fighting Spam And Viruses

The mail server has advanced virus and spam filtering capabilities which scan all messages, incoming and outgoing, for malicious code and unwanted content. Due to the large amount of viruses that appear as attachments in email messages, we are forced to block the transmission of many common file types as attachments. Although this can be an inconvenience to users, it is necessary given the dangers posed by email-borne viruses.

If you are a Windows user, we encourage the use of the Thunderbird email program (along with the excellent Firefox Web browser) to protect your system against viruses that exploit flaws within Internet Explorer. Outlook and Outlook Express both use Internet Explorer to display email messages with HTML in them, putting Outlook users at risk for these types of viruses.