How do I check my mail with Outlook or Entourage?

Here are some links to the instructions you'll need:

Outlook 2003 (PDF)
Outlook 2007
Entourage (PDF)

Note that the instructions for Outlook will not work with Outlook Express.

WesMail is currently the only supported email client for student or off-campus use. If you wish to use another mail client off-campus, you can try following the instructions above, but we can't guarantee that they'll work, and we won't support your configuration.

If you want to use another mail client, you can look at the instructions above and try to translate them. If they don't work, though, you'll have to use one of the several clients we support.

How do I create a folder in WesMail?

It's a little labrynthine, I'll admit. First, click "Mail" on the left sidebar, and then "Folders" at the top of the screen. Above your folder list, there's a drop-down menu reading "Choose Action:". Pull it down, select "Create Folder," enter the name of your new folder, and Bob's your uncle.

How do I add a contact to my WesMail address book?

There are several ways to add a new contact to your WesMail address book.

If you have an email from the person you want to add, you can click the green book icon next to the address in the From: field:

If you don't have an email from the person you want to add, you'll want to click on the small plus icon next to "Address book" in the left sidebar, and then on "New Contact":

From here, you can manually enter all of the contact's information.

How do I create a new contact group in WesMail?

To create a new group, click the plus icon next to "Address Book" in the left toolbar, then click "Add Group":

This will bring up a screen that will allow you to populate the group. First, specify a name. Then, select contacts from the lefthand pane. You can select more than one by holding down "Control" (on a PC) or the Apple key (on a Mac) and clicking:

Once you have selected a contact, you can click the right arrow button to move them to the righthand pane:

Contacts in the righthand pane will be added to the group.

If you add someone to the group and need to remove them, select them in the righthand pane and click the left arrow; this will move them back to the left side.

Once you have added all of the contacts you want to the group, click "Submit."

Groups can only be populated with contacts that are already in your address book. Please click here for instructions to add contacts to your address book.

How do I report mistakes by the spam filter?

Reporting spam that sneaks through our spam filter (and ham that gets caught) helps our spam filter get smarter by learning from its mistakes. In addition, messages you report are parsed and read by a human, who can make our spam filter smarter much more quickly. Best of all, spam that you report is automatically added to your blacklist and ham you report is automatically added to your whitelist. (More information on whitelists and blacklists.)

There are two kinds of messages you'll want to report: false positives and false negatives.

• False Positives are messages that were marked as spam, but which are legitimate messages.
• False Negatives are messages that were not marked as spam, but which are.

Reporting mail that is already marked as spam as a false negative won't do anything; your report will be rejected, in fact. Similarly, reporting mail that wasn't marked as spam as a false positive will be rejected as well. You should only report mail that was marked as spam as a false positive, and only unmarked mail as a false negative.

Note that not all unwanted mail is spam; spam is unsolicited. If you signed up for a mailing list that you no longer want to receive, you should unsubscribe from that list rather than reporting it as spam. This is both much faster, since our spam filter can be a slow learner, and much more efficient, since we no longer have to waste resources blocking emails that could simply not be sent.

To learn how to report messages, please select the mail client you use below.

How do I set up email forwarding?

In WesMail, click the little plus sign next to "My Account" in the left sidebar. Then click "Filters" in the menu that appears. Click "Forward" and you can enter your new email address in the box below -- perhaps "thank_heaven_im_retired@hotmail.com" or just "jrandom@nebrwesleyan.edu". If you want, you can uncheck the box that says "Keep a copy of messages in this account?" and you won't have to worry about your WesMail quota -- otherwise, when your NWU mailbox gets full, forwarding will start to fail. Many people set up email forwarding before they leave NWU; your forwarding rules will remain in effect for one year after your account is deleted, giving you a way to gracefully transition to another email address.

How do I set up a vacation message?

After logging in, click the little plus sign next to "My Account" in the left sidebar. Then click "Vaction" in the menu that appears. Click the big red legend reading "disabled - click to enable" next to "Vacation," and then click "Vacation." The only fields you'll actually want to mess with are the last two -- "Subject" and "Reason."

You'll have to enable and disable the vacation rules manually. Luckily, disabling a rule is as easy as going back to the "Filters" page and clicking the green checkmark to the right of the rule name. Do not just erase your vacation message to turn it off; this will only put a blank vacation reply into place for you.

What should I do if I'm not getting email from a certain person?

First, make sure that the person isn't in your blacklist. Check this page for instructions on accessing and editing your blacklist.

If you're certain that the sender isn't in your blacklist, you'll need to submit a ticket. Please include the following information, or we'll be unable to troubleshoot the problem:

• The sender's email address
• The approximate date and time they sent you a message that did not arrive

Given that information, we should be able to find out why the message didn't come through.

What email lists exist? Who can send to them?

We have several mailing lists, which are updated automatically. These lists are:

In the case of 'students', your E-mail address must be included on the authorized senders list. For most other lists, anyone on the all.employees list may send to any of the employee (faculty/staff) lists. Occasionally, someone sends a message to all.employees or 'students' and they are not on the list of authorized senders. These messages are 'bounced' to the Administrative Systems Manager for approval or other action.

Mail sent to these lists should conform to all applicable policies and guidelines, including "Appropriate Use". Senders are responsible for message content, as the lists are not moderated.

We have regularly scheduled processes that update the E-mail lists. Although the list management software could support 'subscribe' and 'unsubscribe' functions, most lists are 'closed' - membership is determined by the update processes and individuals can neither subscribe nor unsubscribe.

Some of the lists are combined. For example, all.employees includes full-time, part-time, faculty and staff. The combined list is unduplicated, so that each address appears only once. Rather than send mail to 'all.faculty; all.staff' send to 'all.employees'. Anyone who happens to be included on more than one sub-list will appreciate not getting duplicate E-mails.

The student lists are limited to specific, authorized senders. Most other lists will accept mail from anyone on the all.employees list. Otherwise, most lists allow anyone on the list to send to the list. You'll generally just send to one of the lists.

Messages are limited to a size of one megabyte or less, so a text-only format is preferred.

When I leave NWU, can I take all of my email with me?

Yes, but it's not fun.

Unfortunately, there's no universal representation of an email message in a file, so if I sent you all of your email in an archive, you'd be unable to open it. This means you have two options:

1. Forward each message you want to keep to a new account.
2. Copy-and-paste the content of each message into a Word (or other) document.

As you can see, both of these are mindnumbing drudgery, but this is one area in which the existing technology lags behind what users need.

How do I whitelist or blacklist a sender?

Our spam filter has the capacity to set up whitelists, which let you designate some senders whose emails to you will not be scanned, and blacklists, lists of senders whose emails to you will be outright rejected. This can be useful if you subscribe to any opt-in mailing lists, as they are frequently marked as spam. On the other hand, you might find that some spam is not blocked by our filter; you can add the senders to your blacklist to solve that problem.

To set up your whitelists and blacklists, log in to WesMail and click the little plus sign next to "My Account" in the left sidebar. Then click "Filters" in the menu that appears:

This will bring you to the filters page, where all of your email filters are listed:

Click on "Whitelist" or "Blacklist," depending on what list you want to add a sender to. Enter the addresses, one per line, in the large box. You'll probably want to keep the options at the top of the Blacklist as they are:

To remove an address from your blacklist or whitelist, simply delete their email address from the list. (The list is just a text box, so you can type -- and backspace -- in it as usual.)

In addition, you can click on the "Whitelist" and "Blacklist" links at the top and bottom of messages you view in WesMail. Reporting a message as ham will also automatically whitelist a sender; see how to report spam for more information on this.

How can I mark a message as "urgent" in WesMail?

The short answer is that you can't.

The long answer:

Marking messages as "urgent" is a nonstandard extension to email. It's implemented differently in different email clients, so a message marked urgent in Outlook might not show up as urgent in another client.

WesMail follows a very good philosophy: be liberal in what you accept, but strict in what you send. That means that it endeavors to understand all of the various competing systems of email urgency (of which there are at least three), but will not send mail with nonstandard extensions that may or may not be understood by different email clients.

Marking messages as urgent is bad practice anyway, since it assumes that your recipient uses the same mail client as you do. Since WesMail doesn't allow you to mark messages "Urgent," you'll have to simply have patience and faith that your recipient reads their email regularly.

How do I add or remove recipients from an email alias?

To manage your aliases, follow these instructions:

1. Log in to WesMail at https://webmail.nebrwesleyan.edu. You'll use WesMail to manage your aliases even if you prefer a different mail client (like Outlook or Entourage).
2. Click on the plus icon next to "My Account" in the lefthand sidebar. Click on the word "Aliases" in the resulting menu.

This will bring you to a screen that will list your currently owned aliases, and allow you to add more aliases (up to five). To edit an alias, select it from the drop-down menu and, select "Edit", and click "Submit."

To add recipients to the alias, enter their (or your) email addresses in the "Recipients" box, one per line. You can add as many recipients as you wish. To remove recipients, simply delete their addresses from the box. You can enter full addresses ("jdoe@nebrwesleyan.edu") or, for on-campus recipients, usernames alone ("jdoe").

To delete an alias, go back to the "Aliases" screen (from "My Account"), select the alias to delete, and the select "Delete" below it instead of "Edit."

Any changes you make may take a few seconds to show up.

If you try to edit an alias but can't find it in your list, please submit a ticket; you are probably not an owner of the alias.

More details on email aliases

How do I change my password?

You are highly encouraged to change your password periodically for security.

To change your password:

1. Login to WesMail
2. Click the plus sign next to "My Accounts" in the left toolbar
3. Click on "Password" in the resulting menu
4. Enter your old password and your desired new password

Passwords must be at least six characters long. They must have at least three "classes" of characters: upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

How do I set up an email alias?

Each faculty and staff member is given, in addition to their normal email address, up to five aliases they can use for other things.

These other things might include aliases for the department or office they work in (e.g., "admissions@nebrwesleyan.edu"), common misspellings of their name ("stpeirre@nebrwesleyan.edu"), their full name ("Tim.Holtzen@nebrwesleyan.edu"), or anything else.

To manage your aliases, follow these instructions:

1. Log in to WesMail at webmail.nebrwesleyan.edu. You'll use WesMail to manage your aliases even if you prefer a different mail client (like Outlook or Entourage).
2. Click on the plus icon next to "My Account" in the lefthand sidebar. Click on the word "Aliases" in the resulting menu.

This will bring you to a screen that will list your currently owned aliases, and allow you to add more aliases (up to five). To add a new alias, click "Add New Alias." This will prompt you for the address of the alias; if you wanted to make an alias to "Your.Full.Name@nebrwesleyan.edu", you'd just enter "Your.Full.Name". Enter a description for the alias, which is what you'll see in the drop-down menu on the first "Aliases" page.

To add recipients to the alias, enter their (or your) email addresses in the "Recipients" box, one per line. You can add as many recipients as you wish. To remove recipients, simply delete their addresses from the box. You can enter full addresses ("jdoe@nebrwesleyan.edu") or, for on-campus recipients, usernames alone ("jdoe"). Note that you can create aliases in this manner for which you are not the recipient. This is particularly useful for, e.g., student organizations that you sponsor. Since students cannot create aliases, you could create one for them.

To edit an alias, select it from the drop-down menu and, select "Edit", and click "Submit." To delete an alias, do the same thing but select "Delete" instead of "Edit."

Any changes you make may take a few seconds to show up.

Aliases are first come, first served, so be aware that someone else could take your preferred alias. If you believe that this has been done maliciously -- e.g., if someone else has taken your name as their alias -- please submit a ticket.

Conversely, if you try to add an alias that is already an existing email address -- for instance, if you tried to use "stpierre@nebrwesleyan.edu" -- the alias would be added, but it would not work. The original email address would continue to function normally. This ensures that you can't "steal" someone else's mail!

If you need to create an alias that can be edited by more than one person, please submit a ticket and we'll help you with that.

If you have a legitimate need to create more than five aliases, submit a ticket; you can't create them yourself, but we can create them for you.

I accidentally deleted my whole "Junk Mail" folder. Can you bring it back?

No, but you can. There's nothing magical about the "Junk Mail" folder except its name. Just create a new folder called "Junk Mail" (without the quotes, but with the capital letters just so) and filtering will continue as before.

I had something important in my Trash or Junk Mail folder, and now it's gone! Can you get it back?

No. We assume that "Trash" and "Junk" are just that, and those folders are liable to be purged at any time. Don't keep anything important in there, and be sure to cull your Junk Mail folder for real mail periodically as well.

I keep getting a message that says I've reached quota. I deleted a bunch of messages, but I still get it. What gives?

We allot students 500 megabytes and faculty/staff one gigabyte of storage for their mail; this is your quota. If you exceed this quota, you will not be able to receive messages. Unfortunately, when you delete messages, they just go in your Trash folder -- and still count against your quota! To empty your trash, just click on "Mail" near the top of the left sidebar, and then click "Empty Trash" at the top of the screen. If you're sure there's nothing in your Junk Mail you want to keep, click the "Empty Spam" button as well.

We do not grant email quota extensions.

I need another email address that multiple people can check.

NWU adheres strictly to a policy of one account per person and one person per account, so we do not grant additional accounts to anyone under any circumstances. Instead, you'll need to create an alias and have the mail directed to multiple pre-existing accounts.

I think someone is using my email address to send out spam!

Although we like to think of email as being technologically advanced, it's really just like postal mail. That means that email implicitly trusts the "from" address, just like the USPS trusts the return address on an envelope. It also means that anyone can put any "return address" they want on an email -- including yours -- and there's nothing we (or you!) can do about it.

Spammers figured this out a long time ago and have been using it ever since to disguise the true origin of their mail; since then, it's become so common that there's even a word for it: you've been "joe-jobbed."

As part of our spam-fighting arsenal, NWU takes steps to ensure that we're not accepting mail with a forged "from" address, and we've published data about our mail servers so that other people can do the same. But until everyone who runs a mail server -- and that's a lot of people -- addresses spam and joe-jobbing with the same rigor as us (and many other responsible companies and individuals), this will continue to be a problem.

If you believe that someone has actually broken into your account and is sending email from your account, then you should change your password.

Messages in WesMail are out of order. How can I fix this?

You're sorting your mail by something other than date. To sort your mail by date, just click the word "Date" above that column in WesMail:

If you still can't see your newest mail -- i.e., if your mail is now sorted backwards -- click the word "Date" again.

The spam filter keeps blocking messages from my dear Aunt Ethel, but not from refinance@stupid-spammers.com. What gives?

Blocking spam is a messy business, but you can make it better.

First, learn how to report mistakes our spam filter makes. That will help our filter learn and, in the long run, make it work better for you.

Next, check out this page to learn about whitelisting and blacklisting. With a combination of the two, you can make the spam filter work for you, not against you.

Can I access Huxley from off-campus?

You might be wondering what a question about Huxley is doing in an email FAQ. The reason is that you'll actually use WesMail to get to Huxley -- and here's how:

1. Login to WesMail
2. Click the plus sign next to "Huxley" in the left toolbar
3. Click on the drive you want to access -- Home, Misc, or Webdirs.

You'll now have a web interface to Huxley. It's not as slick as accessing it on campus, but it'll do.

To edit a file, for instance, click on it to download it to your hard drive, and edit it there. Then, when you're done editing the file, click the "Browse" button in the upload box at the bottom of the page. Find the file you edited, click "Upload File", and you're done!