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E-mail & Computing
Cyrus Email

Cyrus Email

The Cyrus email software was developed at Carnegie-Mellon University and has been implemented at many of our peer institutions, including CMU, the University of Michigan, and Stanford. It manages access and storage of mail messages according to accepted internet standards, allowing users to access their mail with almost any standards-compliant mail program including Cubmail, Pine, Outlook, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail.

Cyrus is open-source software, developed and maintained through contributions from the community of people who use it. One of the biggest advantages of open-source software is that it can be modified or enhanced based on the features desired by its users. For example, Cambridge University in England adapted Cyrus to make backup copies of all messages in real time ("replication") and to provide a way to recover deleted and expunged messages. Since this was a feature we wanted for you here at Columbia, we hired a programmer to refine the deleted-message recovery facility of Cyrus &mdash and now these improved features have been incorporated into the Cyrus software and are also available to any organization using Cyrus.

The Cyrus mail store is accessible using email software. Cubmail and Pine are configured for you. If you use a mail program installed on your own computer, you can configure it to use IMAP or POP to access your mail. IMAP is recommended because it stores mailboxes on the Cyrus server, where you can access them from anywhere, and where they are backed up by CUIT.

The personal filter system for Cyrus is known as Sieve, and is managed by the web-based Ingo system. Sieve includes "vacation" replies, mail sorting and rejecting.



(Last Modified: Tuesday, June 03, 2008)



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Configuring a mail program

Cyrus users as of 02/11/09: 82041