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General Information about e-mail
What you should know about e-mail
- There is no safe communication method: If you want to be more sure about securing the confidentiality of your communication, it is advisable to use secure connection (e.g. VPN) or encrypt the messages you send
- E-mail delivery may be delayed: although usually the exchange of emails is performed in a short period of time, there are cases when the emails may be delayed without profound cause. This may happen due to network problems, spam filters or multiple redirects. What you should always bear in mind is that, in general, an email may pass through several servers before it reaches its final destination, which can cause cumulative delays.
- E-mails may be lost: Although it is rare, it can happen so if you want to send an important email it is a good practice to ask for confirmation. Also, in many caes spam filters incorrectly characterize mails as spam. As a result they do not apear in the recipientr's INBOX folder. It is advisable therefore, to check the SPAM folder regurarly just in case.
General Information
- In order to save space, it is advisable to perform regularly the "Compact" procedure of the email client you use
- Empty the folders "Junk" and "Trash" (check them carefully beforehand)
- Archive your e-mails in forders according to their content. In this way you may achieve greater usability and speed in managing you e-mail.
- Use the mechanism for "Junk" and "Spam" provided by the e-mail client you use.
Why am I not able to send or receive e-mail?
There are many reasons that can cause this kind of problems. The most common are the following:
- Malfunction of the Domain Name System: in order for an e-mail to be received or delivered correctly, the DNS service must be working properly. This is one of the most essential network services on which the most network services and funcions are based. If for any reason there is a malfuncion of this service, either locally or at the recepient's side, then the email will propably not be delivered.
- Malfunction of the LDAP service which is supported centrally by the University of Crete. In this case, apart from the inability to send and recieve mails, it is not feasible to connect to the Department's mail server. Malfuncion of this service means that the directory of users of the entire University is not available to the server, so any function that relies on that directory will not be able to perform.
- Blacklisted servers or addresses. When an e-mail server systematically sends a large number of spam emails, then this server is blacklisted. Most mail servers (including the mail server of physics department) consult the list of blacklisted servers and exclude the comunication with such servers. Therefore, if you expect to receive and e-mail from a server that is located in a blacklist, it is most likely that you will never receive it. On the other hand, if for any reason the Department's server is included in such a list, our emails may not be delieverd to remote servers.
In any case, if there is a malfunction in sending an email, you will receive a bounce message which exlpains the reason for which your email was not delivered. Ιt may refer to a problem that you can fix yourserves (e.g. wrong recipient's address). If this is not the case, you should contact the Computer Center, indicating the problem encountered and the bounce message in order to diagnose the encountered problem correctly.
