Features of IU Webmail

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Note: On October 29, 2009, UITS began migrating undergraduate student accounts from the IU Webmail (Cyrus) system to the Google-sponsored Umail system. For more, see About the automatic email account migration from IU Webmail (Cyrus) to Umail.

IU Webmail is a web-based email system at Indiana University, allowing access to accounts on the Cyrus mail system. It provides basic email service through a simple web interface, allowing you to read mail easily from anywhere without having to reconfigure a browser or mail client software, as well as to send and open attachments easily from your desktop.

UITS acquired and further developed Webmail specifically to provide ease of access and easy attachment handling, and thus it offers only some of the more sophisticated features of other email clients. If you need features that Webmail doesn't offer, you may want to try using a desktop client to read your Cyrus mail, or see if another email system is available to you. For more information about IU email options, see Reading your Cyrus mail using a desktop email client and At IU, what email systems are available?

For information on how to connect to IU Webmail, see What is IU Webmail? Below are descriptions of some basic features of Webmail, and links to more information.

Quota usage information

Your email account has a quota, which limits the amount of mail you can have in your account at once. Your quota is not based on the number of messages you have, but the total size of all messages and their attachments. For more, see What are the default disk quotas for UITS accounts, and how do I request an increase?

In IU Webmail, your total quota and the amount and percentage of that quota which you are currently using are displayed at the top of the Webmail screen when you first log in. The first number is how much of your quota you are using, in megabytes (MB); the second number is your total available quota; and the third number, in parentheses, is the percentage of your quota that you are using.

Options

You can set your Options to display how your name appears, include a personalized signature in outgoing mail messages, choose mailbox and folder display options, organize your messages in your Inbox, and set other features. For more, see In IU Webmail, what are Options and how do I use them?

Note: You cannot modify the font. By default, the font is formatted as plain text.

Checking for new mail

After you first connect to Webmail and read any new mail, Webmail will check the server periodically for any new messages. You can set how frequently Webmail should check for new mail, and also select whether or not you wish to be notified of new mail via a pop-up window; see In IU Webmail, how do I check for new mail?

You can also manually prompt Webmail to check for new mail by clicking the new mail icon. This icon looks like two arrows forming a rough circle, and is located immediately to the right of the word "Inbox", on the line just below the "Mailbox Quota:" line.

Deleting messages

To delete messages from your account, while looking at the list of messages, check the box next to each message you wish to delete, and then click Delete. Each message you selected will still appear in the list of messages but will have a line through it marking it as deleted. To actually remove the deleted messages from your account, in the upper right corner of the screen, click Purge Deleted.

As soon as you click Purge Deleted in Webmail, all the messages you have marked as deleted will disappear permanently from the server. There are no recovery options from within Webmail.

Note: You can arrange a retrieval attempt for a fee, but UITS cannot guarantee that your files will be recovered; see At IU, who can recover files and email accidentally deleted from UITS central systems?

Attachments

To learn how to include attachments in outgoing mail and to open attachments you receive, see In IU Webmail, how do I use attachments?

Folders

You can create folders and subfolders, and save your messages in them to keep your account organized; see In IU Webmail, how do I use folders?

To keep the messages in your folders organized, see In IU Webmail, how can I sort the messages in a folder?

To find a particular message in a folder or your Inbox, see In IU Webmail, how can I search my messages?

Spell check

Webmail offers a spell check feature; see In IU Webmail, how can I spell check my messages?

Address book

To add entries to or remove entries from your address book, see In my IU Webmail address book, how do I add or remove entries? To completely remove your address book, see In IU Webmail, how can I delete my address book?

Postpone or save drafts of messages

You can save a draft of a message and resume composing it later by clicking Save Draft in the Message Composition window. To set the options for how drafts are stored, see the appropriate section in In IU Webmail, what are Options and how do I use them?

Filters, forwards, and vacation mail

The Cyrus mail servers use a filtering language called Sieve; the web interface for building Sieves is called Ingo, and is accessible via IU Webmail. You can use Ingo to sort incoming mail and send it to different folders based on the sender or the subject line, for example. You can also set up forwarding or a vacation mail message. For more see:

To learn more about IU Webmail, see the IU Webmail tutorial provided by IT Training & Education at IU.

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Last modified on October 21, 2009.