Presbyterian College > Academic Web Server > Support > Downloading E-Mail
We give people a fixed quota of disk space on the P.C. mail server mail.presby.edu. If your disk space fills up, you need to delete old mail to make room for new mail. If you want to keep those old messages, you need to print them out or download them to another computer so you can delete them from the mail server.
This page gives some information about how to download mail from folders on the mail server to another computer (e.g. at home, in your office, etc.). Any e-mail software that can connect to the mail server using the IMAP protocol should be able to do this. Generally speaking, the steps are as follows:
Configure your software to connect to your account on the mail server using the IMAP protocol. Usually this means creating a specific "account" in your mail software, telling it the mail server address, your login name, that you want an IMAP connection, etc.
Create local mail folders (on your computer) to store the messages that you will download from the mail server.
Connect to the mail server and open the folders that you want to download.
Copy messages from the mail server to your local mail folders. Depending on your mail software, you may be able to do this by "dragging and dropping" with the mouse, or you may have to select the messages and then choose a command from the software's menus.
Verify that the messages were copied properly, then delete the original copies from the mail server.
Different e-mail software does these things differently. The detailed instructions below are for Netscape 7.0 running on Macintosh OS X. You may be able to use them as a general guide for other software. I may include instructions for other software, later. If you can contribute instructions for your favorite mail software, please feel free to do so!
You may or may not need to do some of the initial configuration steps, depending on whether you've used Netscape for e-mail before. Also, the Windows version may work a bit differently.
Go to the Window menu and choose Mail & Newsgroups. This brings up a window with a toolbar at the top and four panes:
Go to the File menu and choose New, then Account... This brings up the New Account Setup Wizard, a series of screens that ask for information about the new account.
In the New Account Setup scren, select that you want an email account, then click the Next button.
In the Identity screen, enter your name and e-mail address, then click the Next button.
In the Server Information screen, select the IMAP button (not the POP button, this is important!), enter mail.presby.edu for both the incoming and outgoing servers, and click the Next button.
In the User Name screen, enter your login name on the mail server, and click the Next button.
In the Account Name screen, enter a name that Netscape will use to refer to the account in the folder list. For this example, I'll use PC Mail. Then click the Next button.
In the Congratulations! screen, verify what you entered. If it's OK, click the Finish button. (Otherwise, click the Back button and make corrections.)
If you've just finished setting up a new account, you may still see an Account Settings pane. Click the OK button to dismiss it.
At this point, you should now see PC Mail (or whatever you named the account) in the list of servers and folders in the upper-left pane. Double-click on it and you should see Inbox appear below it.
Click on Inbox and Netscape should ask you for your e-mail password. After you enter your password, you should see a list of all your folders (mailboxes) on the mail server, underneath the Inbox. A list of messages of messages in your Inbox should appear in the upper-right pane.
To create a local folder to put the downloaded messages into:
Go to the File menu and choose New, then Folder... A little box should appear, with a space for the name of the new folder, and a dropdown menu (labeled Create as a subfolder of:) to select where to put the folder.
Choose a name for the folder and enter it into the box.
Open the dropdown menu and choose Local Folders, then choose this for the parent.
Click the OK button, and the new folder should appear under Local Folders in the folder list. You may have to double-click on Local Folders to get it to appear.
Click on a folder that contains messages that you want to download. You should see a list of messages in that folder.
Select the messages that you want to download. You can select a single message by clicking on its title, or multiple messages by shift-clicking, or you can select all the messages by going to the Edit menu and choosing Select, then All.
To copy the selected messages to the local folder, go to the Message menu and choose Copy, then Local Folders, then the specific folder. This will leave the originals on the mail server.
To verify that the messages were copied, select the folder that you copied them to; they should appear in the message list.
To delete the originals from the mail server, select the folder on the mail server, then the messages that you want to delete. Click the Delete button in the toolbar; or go to the Edit menu and choose Delete Message or Delete Selected Messages. (When I tried this, it didn't work at first. I had to quit Netscape, then restart it, before I could delete the messages.)
Presbyterian College > Academic Web Server > Support > Downloading E-Mail
This page was last updated on 28 February 2003. If you have questions or corrections, please contact the Web Servant (webservant at presby.edu).