Reading and Sending E-Mail on your Mac
The e-mail service at Drew features an IMAP e-mail server. IMAP is one of the two popular protocols for internet e-mail, and like other internet standards, IMAP allows e-mail to be read on any a computer that follows the protocol. So your Mac can access the Drew e-mail server as well as your Drew-issue Wintel box can.
To do this:
- Get an internet connection.
- If you have your Mac in your office at Drew, just hook it up to the ethernet jack and turn on the networking software. (You might want to read what Academic Computing has to say about non-standard hardware and software.)
- If you use your Mac at home, you'll have to have your own internet service provider, who should also give you directions for getting hooked up to the internet.
- Get yourself a nice IMAP e-mail client. One good source is VersionTracker, an archive for shareware and freeware applications. If you already have Netscape Communicator or MS Internet Explorer, you can use the e-mail clients built into them, although I recommend a stand-alone client. (I used to use MailDrop from Baylor.) On OS X, Mail is pretty good.
- Configure your client. You'll need a few pieces of information to do this. These may not be all of them, but they should cover most options:
- The IMAP server is email.drew.edu
- The SMTP server is also email.drew.edu, unless you're off-campus using your ISP's server, in which case, consult your ISP
- Use your username (e.g., mine is jmuccigr) as your account name or user ID
- Use your_username@drew.edu (e.g., mine is jmuccigr@drew.edu) as your e-mail address (both sender and reply-to, if you're given those options)
- If you're using Drew's server for smtp (which you'll likely do if you're on campus), be sure to set your client to authenticate to it with your username and password, if it has a place to put this information. Not all clients automatically do this.
- Select the other options that you might want (e.g., check for mail every X minutes, close messages upon delete, connect on start-up)
- Now just save your preferences and quit and re-start your client.
That should be it, but e-mail me jmuccigr@drew.edu if you have any problems.
The regular internet services offered by Drew are naturally all available on any platform, including Macs.
