Computing Support Group

The Meteorology System Support Group is Bret Whissel, System Administrator (408 Love), Kelly Hirai (409 Love), and Bob Broedel, Hardware Support (025 Love). If you have problems with networking or departmental computing systems, come see us or send e-mail to .

Meteorology personnel acquire accounts by filling out a Computer Account Request Form. Leave completed forms in the System Administrator's department mailbox in 404 Love.

You'll find an introduction to Meteorology computer-related procedures and policies, and a brief introduction to using UNIX in the document UNIX You Need to Know. The Meteorology Department subscribes to the campus Information Technology Resource Usage policy.

Departmental E-mail

NOTE: Beginning Fall 2008, the Meteorology Department will not issue new e-mail accounts. New students, staff and faculty should use their FSU-provided accounts for all e-mail communications. All users with current e-mail accounts are encouraged to begin the transition to FSU e-mail accounts as soon as is practical. The rest of this section should be considered legacy information.

Students, faculty and staff may read and send e-mail via web browser from anywhere that provides access to the web (read e-mail now). Log in with your departmental user id and password.

You may prefer to use an e-mail client to read your mail, such as Evolution, Outlook, Eudora, Pine, Netscape, or Thunderbird (there are many others). To work with our e-mail server, any client you select should contain a robust implementation of the IMAP protocol and SSL. (Recent versions of the clients already mentioned are known to work.) We've described some e-mail configuration options to assist you with your set-up.

If you wish your e-mail to be directed to another (non-meteorology) account, send the request to . Be sure to include your meteorology account name and the account to which you want mail forwarded. If mail should bounce from your forwarded address, forwarding will be disabled, as will your meteorology e-mail account.

Spam Control

Departmental e-mail is spam- and virus-filtered. The filters use weighted scoring to evaluate each message you receive based on message content and delivery route. Higher scores indicate a greater likelihood that the message is spam. By default, messages with a spam score higher than 3.5 will not be delivered to your INBOX.

Messages with a spam score above the threshold will be discarded, unless you have created an account with Maia, the e-mail guard dog. Use your e-mail address as your Maia login (e.g., ) with your e-mail password. With a Maia account, you can adjust your own spam filter settings and set up whitelists and blacklists.

Also, if you believe that legitimate e-mail has been filtered, you should take a look through your "spam cache". Identify any mis-labeled mail, and click on "Confirm the Status of These Items": the mis-labeled message(s) will then be delivered to your inbox. Messages will only be kept in your spam cache for up to four days before being deleted. Maia has a lot of configuration options, so you may find it useful to read the on-line [Help] (Maia login required).

Log in to Maia frequently, and verify that your e-mail is properly identified as spam or non-spam. By doing so, the filters will have an opportunity to learn from their past mistakes and successes. In addition, you'll be helping reduce spam on a global scale.