Mail Server
Virtual Union provides a number of email-related services: Plain email, spam and virus filtering, webmail, and bulk mailing lists (intended for groups and clubs; also known as "listserv").
Your VU email address is: your_account_name@vu.union.edu.
Accessing your account
You can access your email account in a variety of ways: using a POP3 or IMAP client, using our webmail service, or from within an SSH (terminal) session.
If you are connecting to our service from off-campus and would like to use a typical email client (like Outlook or Apple Mail or Eudora), please be sure to configure it to use IMAP with SSL ("Secure"), and connect to server: mail.vu.union.edu. Use the mail folder as your base IMAP directory path. Alternatively, you may use POP3S ("Secure POP3" a.k.a. POP3 with SSL). From on campus, you may use the standard IMAP or POP3 protocols.
Forwarding VU email to a different address
Forwarding your email elsewhere: Log in to the VU system using SSH (connect to host users.vu.union.edu) and run the command: vu-account mail forward.
Club Mailing Lists
If you have a club or some other group that could benefit from the use of a managed mailing list, please write to vu-admin and request a new Mailman list. We will help you set it up.
Spam control
We protect email accounts from spam and viruses using real-time blocking lists, graylisting, SpamAssassin, DSPAM and ClamAV.
Using the DSPAM system: When you receive an email that DSPAM believes is spam, it will mark "[SPAM]" in the subject line of the email. You can then configure your email program to look for this and filter accordingly. Occasionally, DSPAM will guess incorrectly, and you will need to train it. There are two ways to do this: through the online spam filtering page, and simply by forwarding the email back to DSPAM. Currently, the online spam filtering page does not work correctly. To classify a received email as spam, forward the email back to your VU email address, but in the subject of the message, write "IS_SPAM". If DSPAM classified an email as spam (but it really wasn't spam), then forward the message to yourself and use the subject: "NOT_SPAM". If you use these special subject lines, these emails will be used to re-train the spam filter so that it is more likely to guess correctly in the future (they will not be delivered to your mailbox a second time).
Additional features
Please log in to the users system via SSH and run the vu-help command for more information.