Electronic Mail at Trinity

Electronic mail, or e-mail, combines the possibility of thoughtful composition, so long familiar in paper missives, with the speed and convenience of the telephone and voice mail. It can be read at leisure, sorted, filed, forwarded or extracted to other programs. It can be sent simultaneously to many recipients. And it spans the globe.

At Trinity, a number of time-saving services are built around e-mail.

• Fullname addressing is a service which enables you to use an easy and formulaic address for any e-mail account on campus, regardless of the system being used to send or receive the mail.
• Outlook is our mail and calendaring software for faculty. It's very powerful, and includes an on-line Address Book.
• Entourage and Mail are the programs available on Macintoshes.

All of these are discussed below.

Fullname Addressing

One resource we have at Trinity is a well integrated and popular electronic mail system. The keystone of our mail system's design is called "fullname mail addressing". "Fullname addressing" is a home-grown facility that enables anyone - on or off campus - to send an electronic mail message to a Trinity recipient without first knowing their "user name", or on what "host" they read their electronic mail (that is, where they log in). Instead, all mail to Trinity users can be addressed in this way:

• Firstname.Lastname@trincoll.edu

For example, the Director of Information Technology can be reached at

• John.Langeland@trincoll.edu

The only provisos are that "middle names" and initials are dropped, and that hyphens and apostrophes are also deleted. For example, the Director of Academic Computing, Jean-Pierre Haeberly, can be reached at

• JeanPierre.Haeberly@trincoll.edu

When in doubt, take a quick look at the Trinity online directory, located at http://internet2.trincoll.edu/ptools/directory.aspx, which is based on the same database that the Fullname mail handling program uses.

Fullname even knows about some nicknames, and when it returns mail with undeliverable addresses it tries to be helpful. It makes educated guesses about names it knows that are similar to the ones you tried to reach.

When sending mail from our campus to a recipient on our campus, you may dispense with the "@trincoll.edu" appendage.

Outlook

Outlook provides an electronic calendar to keep track of  your appointments, an on-line phone book, and other useful features.

From home, people can use Outlook Express, a free program, to access the same mail box that they access with Outlook in their office, or if you would prefer not to install Outlook Express, you may choose to check Outlook email via the web at http://webmail.trincoll.edu. 

Entourage and Mail

Most Macintosh users currently make use of either Entourage or Mail programs, both of which provide some of the same functionality that Outlook provides on the Windows platform. You can check email via the web at http://webmail.trincoll.edu.

As usual, if you have questions or need help with campus e-mail, please contact the Help Desk at x2100.

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