An introduction to email at PSU.

• General information

• Forwarding email on a Sun cluster machine to somewhere else

• Forwarding Access email to somewhere else

• Creating an alias to your Penn State email address

• More information

General Information

As a student, staff or faculty of Penn State University you can obtain a Penn State Access Account that enables you to receive and send email.

If you attended Freshman Orientation or Transfer Orientation, you should already have your Access account. If not, take your Penn State photo ID card to one of the Access Account Signature Stations to get your Access account.

You will be given a user ID which will usually be a combination of your initials and a 3 digit numbers for students and a 1 or 2 digit number for faculty and staff. For example, if Foo Bar is a student, he would probably have an ID such as

          fxb101

The email address of Foo Bar is then

         fxb101@psu.edu

For those of you who have been here for some time, you may have found that Foo Bar could also use the email address

         fxb101@email.psu.edu

However, that is no longer true. That is, the email address

	fxb101@email.psu.edu

is an invalid address. SIMPLY DON'T USE THAT FORM OF ADDRESS, use the form

	fxb101@psu.edu

If you have accounts on different machines and would like all of your email to go to one machine only then read on. Actually, it is a good idea to have all of your emails forwarded to one machine.

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Forwarding email on a Sun cluster machine to somewhere else

This applies only if you have an account on a Unix machine such as those in our Sun cluster.

• Login to one of our Sun machines
• Type

  	cd
  	ls -a
  

• If you have file called

  	.forward
  

  then you need to edit it. If it is not there you need to create it. Either way, this can be done by using an editor such as emacs, vi, pico, or gedit.
• You need to put the email address that you want your email to be forwarded in there. For example, if your Access email is

          fxb101@psu.edu 
  

  and you want to forward your email on the Sun cluster to your Access email address then your .forward file must contain the single line:

  	fxb101@psu.edu
  

• NOTE 1: It's best to use the format fxb101@psu.edu instead of fxb101@email.psu.edu.
• NOTE 2: To stop mail forwarding you have to remove the .forward file. The command is

  	rm .forward
  

• NOTE 3: The above instructions are also applicable for those who have an account on a Unix machine such as farman.

Forwarding Access email to somewhere else

You can forward your Access email to somewhere else by the following steps:

1. Go to https://www.work.psu.edu
2. If you are not logged in yet, authenticate using your Access account user ID and password.
3. Under Other Directory Information in the center of the screen, click on Change your e-mail forwarding address
4. In the Forwarding Address field, enter the email address you want your emails forwarded to.
5. Click on Change button

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Creating an alias to your Penn State email address

The alias allows you to create a different email address that others may use to send emails to you. In other words, if your user ID is fxb101, and you create an alias "foobar", then the emails sent to foobar@psu.edu will work exactly the same as the emails sent to fxb101@psu.edu. You can create upto three aliases by the following steps:

1. Go to https://www.work.psu.edu
2. If you are not logged in yet, authenticate using your Access account user ID and password.
3. Under Other Directory Information in the center of the screen, click on Add/Change Other Directory Information
4. In the Alternate E-mail ID field, enter an alias you like. Remember this should be unique on PSU domain. If it is not unique the change will not be updated and you will get an error message. You can have up to 3 aliases.
5. Click on Save Changes button at the bottome of the page

• does not change your Penn State Access Account user ID
• does not replace your Penn State Access Account user ID which is required for logging in and checking email, using eLion and/or using ANGEL
• is not the same as forwarding your email to another email address.

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More information

• Computing at Penn State
• Access Accounts