Recommendations and Advisory Information

Users must be aware that computer networking is inherently insecure, and that all traffic that they place on the network (including electronic mail) is capable of being read by third parties, and conduct themselves accordingly.

For e-mail, users are very strongly recommended not to use a Telnet connection to Hermes (or whatever official e-mail server they use). They should instead use an e-mail client on their machine which uses the IMAP (preferably) or POP3 (tolerated) protocols to exchange e-mail with servers such as Hermes. Recommended IMAP clients are:
  • Mulberry (for Macs or Windows),
  • Microsoft Outlook Express,
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
All can be downloaded free of charge. There are sound technical reasons for this recommendation, relating to the ability to handle attachments, and network traffic and load on Hermes. E-mail users should therefore regard the installation of one of the above on their machine as a priority. Many Windows machines come with Microsoft Outlook Express already installed, but it is a bit of a pig to configure, and highly vulnerable to viruses.
As an alternative to using an e-mail client on your own PC, you may use the Hermes web interface at https://webmail.hermes.cam.ac.uk/. This is particularly useful if you wish to check your e-mail while you are away from Cambridge.

Users should publicise their e-mail addresses in the form crsid@cam.ac.uk and not in the form crsid@hermes.cam.ac.uk (for instance). This will permit the easy diversion of your e-mail to other servers should you move your allegiance away from Hermes to departmental e-mail servers. This is particularly important for postgraduate students.

In order to implement the above recommendation, users should specially configure their e-mail program so that:
  • either the "From:" header shows the message as coming from crsid@cam.ac.uk
  • or the "From:" header shows the actual source (e.g. crsid@hermes.cam.ac.uk) and an extra "Reply-To:" header shows an address crsid@cam.ac.uk.
The former option is less likely to cause confusion.
Hermes e-mail users should configure their e-mail program as follows:

Address for outgoing SMTP mail:smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk
Address for IMAP connection: (Recommended)
imap.hermes.cam.ac.uk
Address for POP3 connection:pop.hermes.cam.ac.uk
User identifier for IMAP/POP login:(your CRSid)
User's e-mail address:crsid@cam.ac.uk

See here for configuring email clients. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/muasettings.html

If you use Microsoft Outlook Express to read news, you must disable its default setting to fetch news from the Microsoft news server in the USA.

For more detailed information on the above, see Leaflet IS5: IP Networking Software Configuration
Web browser users should configure their browsers as follows:

Home page:http://www.queens.cam.ac.uk
Search page (if configurable):http://www.cam.ac.uk/global/search/websearch.htm


Network links to other countries are a scarce resource and are shared with all other universities in the UK. These links are used for serious research purposes, whereas much student use of the World-Wide Web is recreational. Users who browse web or FTP servers in other parts of the world should do so at times of day when links to those countries are least active.

In particular, all traffic to or from outside the University of Cambridge is chargeable, and costs generated by your use of the network will be billed to the College. The College will pass charges on to your traffic usage exceeds your quota (see Network Traffic Charge).

Users who want to download large files from overseas sites should instead use mirror sites in the UK where they exist. It is selfish and anti-social to clog international links with large file transfers when copies already exist in the UK.