Understanding E-mail Clients and Attachments

E-mail Clients
Mail clients are the applications you use to read or send your mail messages. Carnegie Mellon uses the Cyrus electronic mail and bulletin board system. To help you choose a supported email client, we recommend reading the Supported Mail Clients section of the Email Overview at Carnegie Mellon document.

Securing Your Email Client
Computing Services does not allow clear-text authentication to servers on campus. This means that any email client used with Computing Services' email servers MUST be configured to use an authentication method that provides encryption of the users' password.

Opening Attachments
Because of the way some viruses harvest e-mail addresses, an infected message may appear to come from someone you know, or may even show your name in the "From" line. Be extremely cautious and check with the sender (even if you know them) before you open e-mail attachments. It's less of an inconvenience than cleaning up after an infection. There are a number of things to consider when reading your e-mail messages. For more information, see Securing Your Machine: Definitions.

Important Note: Computing Services will NEVER send a security announcement e-mail message that contains an attachment.