Email Policy

This document details the specific rules pertaining to electronic mail and its transmission, viewing, and management. The Physics Computer Network makes very few rules concerning this area of computing. The rules below supplement the official University policy on Electronic Mail and are put in place primarily to provide users with fair regulation of mail disk space, and to protect from mail abuse and the transmission of computer viruses. Unless otherwise noted, these policies apply to all computers on the Physics Computer Network as defined by the Workstation Support Policies Document.

If you have any questions about what is covered in this document, please send mail to staff@physics.purdue.edu.

As a user of the Physics Computer Network you may not:

• Knowingly send, traffic, or contribute to the transmission of unsolicited e-mail (SPAM).
• Subscribe a user to a mailing list without his or her consent, unless otherwise exempted by PCN staff.
• Operate a mail server of your own.
• Leave messages on the server (or spool for UNIX users) of a size so large that it interferes with another user's access to mail.
• Knowingly transmit or contribute to the transmission of a mail bomb.

In a world where you are judged only by the ASCII you type and the manner in which you transmit it, having proper netiquette is very important. Below are rules of thumb for safe and efficient e-mail management, and a few to help you save face in the usually unforgiving 'net community.

Please try to never send attachments with your messages, especially large files. Instead, you should place the file you want to be transmitted in your www directory, chmod it to 644, and send the URL linking to the file in the body of your message. For example:

Dear PCN, You'll love this movie. It's my neighbor's cat http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~crh/catattack.mpg

This allows the recipient to read your message before downloading a large file and allows them to download it at their leisure.

Obviously there are some cases where sending an attachment cannot be avoided. In these cases, you should take care to set the appropriate MIME type for your file, so that the document will be transmitted in binary format. In most cases, the MIME type is set automatically. If you receive complaints that your documents “show up as garbage”, please contact PCN staff to learn how to set your MIME type . The complete list of MIME types is available by typing:

more /usr/local/etc/mime.types

on any PCN multi-user machine.

Proprietary document formats such as Microsoft Word are not always appropriate for sending via email. For world wide readability, and prevention of virus transmission, you should try if at all possible, to send the document in another format.

Documents suitable for printing should be transmitted keeping a few things in mind:

• Does the recipient have the same Operating System as you?
• Is the document going to be edited by the recipient?
• Does the document use Macro's?
• Is the document only made up of text?

Documents that will not be edited by the recipient should be converted to a final format document. One such format is Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). This will ensure that the recipient will see and print exactly what you intended, and will not require them to have special fonts or a particular Operating System. However, with some exceptions, these files may not be edited once they have been created.

Documents that require the ability to be edited again, may be sent in a variety of formats. The most common is Rich Text Format (RTF). Saving your document in this format will allow character placement and fonts be preserved. It will have difficulty with embeded charts, pictures, etc. If your file is all text, you should consider saving it as a plain text file.

UNIX users should note that most native file formats, such as troff, and LaTeX, while non offensive, are generally unviewable on non-UNIX machines. A PDF file should be generated from Postscript in this case.

If you absolutely must transmit a document in Microsoft Word format, please try to save the file as a Word 6 document. This will minimize the likelihood that you will transmit a virus, and maximize the chances that a recipient with an unknown Operating System will be able to view your file.

Finally, when in doubt, ask the intended recipient if they can view your document type before you send it. They may suggest to you a better format to send for your case.

Unsolicited email, commonly referred to as spam on the internet has become quite a problem. To try and protect our users from becoming victims of this ever growing disease, we have the following guidelines:

• If you receive unsolicited email DO NOT REPLY TO IT. Many mass mailing programs are not targeted to you at all and do not actually know your email address. If you reply to them, they will now know for certain that your address is valid. You will then be bumped up on group mailing files as someone with a pulse.
• If you receive several messages from the same person, please forward this mail to PCN staff. PCN maintains an active list courtesy of the MAPS Real-time Blackhole.
• Do not use the same username as your Physics account on any web pages on which you might have accounts.
• If you do not use your web browser as your mail program, set your email address in the browser properties to be a bogus address.
• There are many other “anti-SPAM” methods, but they are often cumbersome to legitimate users with whom you exchange dialog.

Mail Bomb

A message or messages of a size so large or so numerous that it interferes with another user's access to their e-mail.

MIME Type

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions are a standard method of specifying message bodies and encoding types. This allows for binary files, pictures and other types of data to be transmitted effortlessly through a system not originally intended for data of such variety (E-mail). Some common MIME types are as follows:

• application/ms-word
• image/jpeg
• text/html
• application/x-zip-compressed

To see the exact specification for MIME, please refer to RFC1341.

A generic term for unsolicited electronic messages. Historically, the term was used primarily on USENET to describe messages that have little or no contributing value to the discussion at hand. A message without “favor” or “real content” was dismissed as “spam”. In later years it came to mean an unsolicited message of any kind.