You will have an e-mail account on the CS Dept. network.
If you have an e-mail account elsewhere that is more convenient for you to use, you can easily arrange for your e-mail to be forwarded automatically to your preferred address.
Log into any CS Dept. workstation. You will want to create, in your home directory (the one you are in when you first log in), a file named ".forward".The contents of this file should be a single line of text containing your preferred e-mail address.
You can create this file using your favorite text editor, or you can simply use the Unix echo command to write the desired text into the file. For example, if you wanted all your e-mail to be sent to bogus@megacorp.com, you would do the following
cd ~ echo "bogus@megacorp.com" >! .forward cat .forward
The final cat command should show the contents of the .forward file to be your desired address. (Note: Unix files that start with a "." are "invisible" to the normal ls command. To see them in a directory listing, you have to add the -a option: ls -a.)
Now, test it out! If you have a bad e-mail address in your .forward file, you could lose messages. So send yourself mail (to your ODU CS account). It should appear, in due course, at your preferred e-mail address. How long it actually takes depends on many factors. It may take only a few minutes. If after a few hours, you have not received the e-mail, delete your .forward file. Try again, if you wish. Or you might try on another day just in case the CS Dept. mail server, or the one at your preferred site, was temporarily out of commission. If you have repeated problems getting mail forwarded quickly, you might want to rethink your desire to use this feature. For most people, this procedure works without much trouble.
You can actually have more than one forwarding address. The .forward file can contain a comma-separated list of forwarding addresses. For example, you might use
bogus@megacorp.com, bogus@home.netSome students have indicated a desire to keep a backup copy of their mail on the CS Dept system, but to get their "normal" mail somewhere else (e.g., because their mail server at work is crash-prone). This is possible, by making your e-mail address on the CS Dept. system one of the forwarding addresses, so that you forward a copy right back to yourself:
\yourLoginName, bogus@megacorp.comThe backslash apparently prevents the mailer from consulting your .forward file a second time (which would lead to an infinite cycle of mail forwarding).