FAQ Cyrus

For more information on this topic refer to:

Understanding Cyrus and Mail Clients

What is Cyrus?

The Cyrus Mail System is an electronic mail and bulletin board system. It is a highly scalable system based on standard internet protocols. The protocols used are IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol), IMSP (Internet Message Support Protocol), POP3 (Post Office Protocol) and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) for enclosures.

What is a Cyrus client?

Mail clients are applications used to access or read your mail.

Mail Client Questions

What Cyrus clients do you support and recommend?

For a list of recommended and supported clients, see the Email Clients page.

Dlist and Address questions

How do I create new dlists?

A distribution list is a text file on Andrew that contains a list of addresses. The insides of the file should look like this:

Distribution-errors-to: yourid+@andrew.cmu.edu

Distribution-content:

address@site,

Copy the text above to a file named with the .dl extension (for example, sample.dl). Replace yourid+@andrew.cmu.edu with your email address. Replace each address@site with an email address. Make sure to end each address with a comma.

Do NOT use MSWord to edit your dlist file -- it will insert control characters into the file, which will cause mail sent to the dlist to fail.

How do I find an email address?

You may look up the an email address for any Carnegie Mellon affiliate using the Carnegie Mellon Directory.

BBoard Questions

How do I post to bboards?

Unfortunately, there are no IMAP or POP clients that can understand or parse bboards addresses separately from "user" email addresses. For this reason you need use the "post+" prefix when sending mail to bboards. A bboard post address would have the form:

post+bulletinboardname@andrew.cmu.edu

For example, to post to the cmu.misc.market board from Cyrus, you would use:

post+cmu.misc.market@andrew.cmu.edu

For the external Usenet news groups, you need to use a slightly different format:

post+oldAMSstylenewsgroupname@andrew.cmu.edu

i.e. to post to the group pgh.food, for the "to:" address you would use:

post+netnews.pgh.food@andrew.cmu.edu