How to setup special features in your UBNet email account

Your UBNet email account is capable of special features not commonly found in other email systems. Those features will allow you to, among other things, to set a vacation notice, forward all your email to another account and even deliver emails directly to different folders according to their content. This page will try to explain some of those features.

How to setup vacation notice
How to forward your email
How to view and modify email rules
How to create and edit email rules
How to activate your setup

To get to your account management page, login to your WebMail account: http://webmail.bridgeport.edu
After Logging in, click on Options at the top of the screen, then click on UBNet Account Management. You will then be at the main account management screen:

Setting up vacation notice

The vacation notice system will allow you to let others know you are not available. Because this is an automatic responder, it has a built-in mechanism that will allow a maximum of one response per person per day. This protects our email system from mail loops and abuse. The above limiter can not be disabled. To set your vacation message, From the management main menu, click on Set Vacation. The Vacation Setup page appears:

Fill the Vacation Text window with the message you would like your recipients to receive. Set the Vacation Active to Yes and click on Save Changes. Make sure your vacation script is active by following the instructions here. That's it! your vacation message is all set. When you come back, just go to the above screen, select Vacation Active to No and click on Save Changes. This will disable your vacation notice. Bon Voyage!

Forwarding your Email

At times, you might be interested in forwarding all your email to another account. Please remember that the University will not be responsible for any lost email or confidentiality issues once you are forwarding your email to a third party service. To setup forwarding, start at the main management page, click on Forward Mail. You will be at the following page:

Fill your forwarding address in the space and click on Save Changes. Make sure your forward script is active by following the instructions here. To remove the forward, repeat the above procedure, and remove the address from the box, then Save Changes.

Viewing and modifying rules

Every command to the mail server is a "rule". You can view/modify/disable or delete every rule. You can also change the order of the rules, thus changing their priority. To view your rules, click on View/Edit Rules in the main menu:

You can use the dropdown selection box to disable or delete the rule as well as edit it by choosing the appropriate choice in the drop down. Click Save Changes to apply it.

Creating and Editing rules

Our mail system allows you to compile a set of rules that is applied to every incoming email. To create a new rule, click on Add Rule at the main menu:

Rules take the general form IF the message satisfies some condition, THEN do something with the message. You may specify multiple conditions for one rule. You may choose whether the message must satisfy all of the conditions that you specify, or whether any of the conditions will satisfy the rule. The conditions which may be specified are:

from, to or subject field contains specified text
Msg size (message size) is less than or greater than some value in Kilobytes (eg. 1000 for 1Mb)
a user-specified field contains certain text. Valid fields include Date, X-Priority, etc.
You may Use regular expressions (top of table) for advanced expression string matching, rather than simple string matching for this rule. This option is recommended for advanced users only.

Possible actions to be taken with messages which meet the above conditions are:

File Into: move the message into a particular folder (choose folder from list)
Forward: send the message to a different email address (indicate the email address)
Reject: discard the message and notify the sender with a specified text message
Discard: discard the message with no notification to the sender
If Continue checking other rules after applying this rule (top of table) is checked, then the message will continue to be processed by the script even if it satisfies your filter rule. A single message could therefore satisfy more than one rule, possibly resulting in multiple copies of the message or multiple responses.
Checking Keep a copy in your Inbox (top of table) will cause a copy of the filtered message to remain in the Inbox, regardless of other actions taken on it. Choosing this may result in multiple copies of your messages.

Alternatively, your may specify a Custom Rule using raw script. This system uses a script language called Sieve. You can find the reference for the Sieve Mail Filtering Language here. Please note that raw script coding is very powerful but also dangerous. You can easily lose your mail with a buggy script.

As mentioned previously, make sure your rule script is active by following the instructions here.

Activating your script

In order to make sure your configuration script is active, click on Advanced in the main menu. The Advanced setup screen will come up:

To activate your script, select Yes in the Activate Script? option, then click on Save Changes. After saving the changes, your page should look like this:

Note the defscript* in bold and with a following asterisk. This marks your default script as active.