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Access Your E-mail through the Web
by Julio Polo
 Through the use of standard Internet protocols it has been possible
for you to access your hawaii.edu e-mail through a variety of
means, from the venerable character-oriented host-based Pine to
the friendliest of graphical clients on your personal computer.
While ITS has encouraged migration to graphical clients for years
for everyone who uses the same computer regularly, Pine has been
a good option for people to access their hawaii.edu e-mail from
an occasional computer in a lab, at someone else's office, or
while travelling. This has changed with our introduction of a
new Web-based e-mail interface. Through this interface, you can
access your hawaii.edu e-mail from any computer on the Internet
with a Web browser.
The Web interface is now available at:
https://mail.hawaii.edu
To use this new Web mail service, we recommend hardware conformant
to our microcomputer recommendations at www.hawaii.edu/itsdocs/gen/itsrec and upgrading to the latest version of your browser software.
This service also requires that you configure your browser to
accept cookies.
It is highly encouraged that you use the secure https URL to maximize
your privacy. The secure version is a bit slower because it encrypts
communications to and from your browser, making it difficult for
someone to intercept sensitive information, including the password
used to access your account. The majority of free Web mail services
do not offer encrypted access. Hotmail does not allow the entire
Web mail session to be encrypted, but it does encrypt the password
during the login process.
Because our own Web mail service is now available, we are blocking
non-University Web sites from accessing our mailboxes. If you
have been using an external Web site to access your user@hawaii.edu
e-mail, you must now use our Web site. This is necessary since
there is no guarantee that external sites will treat our accounts
and passwords with the same concerns for privacy and security
that we would for ourselves. For example, the majority of such
sites do not use encryption, therefore making them a weaker and
highly visible target for obtaining passwords. We also have no
way to know if they are storing your passwords in their own computer
systems.
This first implementation of Web mail is intended to provide basic
email functionality. Notably missing are searching, filtering,
and sorting capabilities. We will continue to research all avenues
available to provide a richer set of features. And of course more
sophisticated clients such as Netscape Communicator and Eudora
are encouraged for use on the computer you use regularly.
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