You can use your existing PPP account (e.g. with iSTAR, etc.) to access your CCN mail by telling your offline mail reader (such as Eudora) to use chebucto.ns.ca as the POP server. your CCN id would be your POP account name; xxxxx@chebucto.ns.ca (xxxxx being your userid) as your email address; and your password would be your CCN password. Please note that to prevent junkmailers from appearing as legitimate CCN emailers and abusing our mail system, the SMTP entry of your system _must_ be set to your ISP address and not to: chebucto.ns.ca. Mail sent to offsite addresses through the SMTP server will be bounced. Send your replies from your ISP address from now on. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The reason for this action that spammers (junk-mailers) have, in the past, used CCN's mail server to send their junk email by directly connecting to the SMTP server. This has led to two problems: 1. CCN's response time for legitimate users was slowed down or, in a few cases, cut off completely due to the overload on the system. CCN has crashed completely in more than one instance due to the overload. 2. Other Internet providers who were upset at getting junk email relayed through CCN's servers were threatening to cut CCN off completely from sending any email to their servers. Closing CCN's SMTP server from outside access for relaying was a necessity. Unfortunately, there is no way to do it selectively as there is no way for the SMTP protocol to distinguish between a legitimate user and a spammer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------