Managing Mail Accounts

As a Computer Science student here at Brock you may have an email account on Sandcastle which you will likely want to coordinate with your other accounts so that you are receiving all your mail in one place. Up until September 2006 all Computer Science students had, by default, an email account of the form login@cosc.brocku.ca.  Due to changes in mail policies at Brock this practice has been discontinued, however this leaves many accounts which are still active but likely not being used.

By default all students have a mail account on Badger which is their @brocku.ca mail account. Changes in the FW2006 term have made it so that you can not forward your mail from Badger to any other system so this mail account must be monitored. Therefore the need for a Sandcastle mail account has become quite unneccesary as you can no longer forward your Badger mail to it. The only reason to keep your Sandcastle mail account physically active is if you want a second email account, however please note that all course correspondance goes to your Badger account. So most students will want to either forward their mail or completely disable their Sandcastle mail so that no one sends mail to an account which is not being read. In order to make this process easier we have created a web utility to set your mail preferences. You can access it at: https://www.cosc.brocku.ca/cgi-bin/getmailprefs.php 

If you want to forward your Sandcastle mail to an external account I would suggest that you save a copy on Sandcastle until you are sure of the reliability in which the mail is forwarded to your other account.

Creating the .forward file

• log into the server that you want to forward the mail from
• create/edit a file called ".forward" in your home directory
• each line in the file should contain a destination for your mail

For example, the following contents of a .forward file placed in your home directory will keep a copy of all mail on Sandcastle and then forward a copy off campus. (replace zz00zz with your login).

\zz00zz, some_account@off-campus.domain.com 

The first line directs the the server to keep a local copy of the mail, this is a good practice when you first set up the forwarding so that you still have a copy if something goes wrong. Once you are satisfied that the forwarding is working as expected you can remove that line from your .forward file.