Email Client Configuration

We currently have a number of different email systems on campus. Students and most adjunct faculty share one server, tenured faculty and staff use a collection of Exchange servers, and Alumni are on yet a third system. Unfortunately, the connection settings you'll need to use for an email client (such as Apple's Mail or Microsoft Outlook) are different for each system. So before you can configure an email client, you'll need to know what system you're on.

Cougar Webmail (Students and Alumni)

All students and Alumni use Cougar Mail by Google, rather than a service hosted on campus. For more information on retrieving your Cougar E-mail using your own e-mail client, use Google's Documentation at the link below:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=75725

Microsoft Exchange

Exchange users are those users who use Outlook Web Access to view their email when not at their primary computer. These are mostly tenured faculty and staff members. If the Help Desk set up your computer with Microsoft Outlook, this is likely the system you're looking for.

To configure an email client to send and receive through our Microsoft Exchange environment, use the following settings:

Receiving Mail
Protocol:	IMAP
Server:	copilot.csusm.edu
Port:	143
Security / Authentication:	STARTTLS / Password
Username/Password	Use your campus username (e.g. smith001, not smith001@csusm.edu) and normal password.

Sending Mail
Protocol:	SMTP
Server:	postoffice.csusm.edu
Port:	25 or 10025 (see note below)
Security / Authentication:	STARTTLS / Password
Username/Password:	Use your campus username (e.g. smith001, not smith001@csusm.edu) and normal password.

Squirrelmail (UNIX Webmail)

In some cases, our faculty may have arranged to have mail on our UNIX email system. Users of this system generally access it via Squirrelmail.

To configure an email client to send and receive through our UNIX environment, use the following settings:

Receiving Mail
Protocol:	IMAP
Server:	coyote.csusm.edu
Port:	143
Security / Authentication:	STARTTLS / Password
Username/Password	Use your campus username (e.g. smith001, not smith001@csusm.edu) and normal password.

Sending Mail
Protocol:	SMTP
Server:	postoffice.csusm.edu
Port:	25 or 10025 (see note below)
Security / Authentication:	STARTTLS / Password
Username/Password:	Use your campus username (e.g. smith001, not smith001@csusm.edu) and normal password.

Notes on sending email

In order to minimize the amount of spam sent from our servers, we require that clients authenticate with the server before they can send email. And because we require people to authenticate and we have to take their campus passwords over the internet, we require all mail communication to be sent securely via TLS/SSL.

Some clients will figure this out automatically (Mozilla Thunderbird 2, and Apple Mail in OS X Leopard), while some others don't (Apple Mail prior to OS X Leopard, and Microsoft Outlook Express). If your client doesn't figure it out automatically, you'll need to manually enable TLS support. As soon as we get the chance we'll supply screenshots and specific instructions to do so.

Also, some Internet Service Providers (notably Cox High Speed Internet) will block the standard mail sending port (25) in an attempt to stymie spammers. To get around that, we offer our mail sending service on both port 25 and port 10025. So if one port doesn't work for you, give the other a try.