When you're away from the office you are most likely away from your AU email account as well. If you're concerned about missing important messages while you're out there are several things you can do. The easiest alternative if you already have access to the Internet is to browse to AU's web-based email service at webmail.aurora.edu. You can do this from any networked PC (just remember to log out when you're finished, especially if you're working from a public machine).

There is a third approach: using AU's webmail interface to make administrative changes to your email account. Two functions are available -- vacation messages and message forwarding -- and they can be implemented separately or together. This guides describes how to set up and use these utilities.

Logging into Webmail

Webmail is AU's name for our implementation of Squirrelmail, an online service that can be used from any browser to read, send, and manage messages. But even if you normally prefer to handle your mail from other program such as Mozilla, Outlook, or Thunderbird, you can still take advantage of the administrative tools available in Squirrelmail

To access AU Webmail, follow the Webmail link on the AU home page, or point your browser directly to webmail.aurora.edu. When the following login screen appears, enter your AU email username and password and click Login.

Upon successful login, you will see the Squirrelmail home page, which should be displaying the current contents of your inbox. Across the top of the screen is a line of hot links. Click the link labeled Options. On the next page, you'll see two columns of links to various tools, along with a brief description of their function. To implement either vacation messages or forwarding, click the link labeled Vacation Message, which is located in the right column, near the bottom. Both functions are controlled from the same page, as described below.

Vacation Messages

The top of the Vacation Message page is used to create a special email replay that your correspondents will receive while you are out. There are three fields to fill in on this part of the form, as illustrated here:

Send auto-reply to sender? You must check this box in order for your message to be sent. This is, in effect, the on-off switch for the vacation message service. When this box is checked (as in the above example), the email system will automatically send a copy of your vacation message to everyone who sends you email. Unchecking the box will turn off the service, and no vacation message will be sent. This option allows you to keep a default vacation message on the system, so that when you are away from the office all you need to do is make a few quick updates to the default text and check the box to activate the service.

Vacation Subject. Enter here the text that will appear on the subject line of the message the sender receives. Examples are "Vacation message from Tom," "Out of the office," "Gone skiing in Europe," etc. The idea is to let your correspondents know that their message arrived even though you are not there to receive it.

Vacation Message. In this box enter the complete text of the message you want your correspondents to receive. You can customize the text to include the length of your absence, how you would like urgent requests to be handled, and any other information you want the recipients to have.

To activate these changes, click the button at the bottom of the page. But don't click it yet if you have forwarding instructions (see next section).

Message Forwarding

The lower half of this form is for setting up forwarding instructions. The Vacation Message approach described above lets your correspondents know that your message arrived, and all incoming messages will continue to pile up in your inbox until you are ready to receive them. If you prefer, you may wish to have incoming messages delivered to another location while you're away.

There are two distinct uses for this service. If you are temporarily absent from the office, you can use this feature to send messages to a different account that you are more likely to see while you're away. On the other hand, if you prefer to use an alternative email address (such as AOL, Comcast, etc.) you can use this feature to automatically send all AU messages to another address. Since current policy at AU is that official communications for students and staff are sent only to official AU email addresses, this is one way to make sure you don't miss any important messages. Please note, however, that if you forward your email to another account AU cannot guarantee that it will be delivered. For a variety of reasons the service that is the recipient of your forwarded mail may for its own reasons decide to reject your messages (for example, if it believes those messages are SPAM). To ensure that you don't miss any important messages, it is best to access your AU email account directly instead of forwarding it to another address.

The fields for setting up mail forwarding are at the bottom of the form:

Forward incoming message to another email address? This box must be checked for email forwarding to take place. In the example above, forwarding has been activated.

No local delivery -- Forward and/or Auto-reply only. If this box is unchecked, as in the above example, a copy of the incoming message will be saved in the recipient's inbox in addition to another copy being sent to the forwarding address. If the box is checked, the forwarded message will not be saved locally. For temporary mail forwarding, it would make sense to keep this option unchecked, to assure local delivery. However, if you're having all of your email messages forwarded elsewhere on a permanent basis, it would be a good idea to check this box to prevent the accumulation of large numbers of messages in your AU inbox that you will never see.

Forwarding E-Mail Addresses. Put the complete forwarding address(es) in this box, one per line. Make sure the address is correct, and includes both the user name and the email domain. Normally there will be only one address, but if you wish you can have a copy of the message sent to additional addresses. Just make sure each address is on it's own line.

Once you are certain that the settings for this section (and if applicable the Vacation Message section), go ahead and click the Change Settings button at the bottom of the form:

Returning to your original settings

Don't forget that upon your return, you will need to remember to go back to this page to return all your settings to normal. Failure to do this may mean that you will miss important messages.