All student accounts come with standard email. Newsgroups are electronic discussion groups that anyone can post messages to.

You must monitor your undergraduate account for mail. You can choose to read it directly or forward it to another account. (ex. joestudent@hotmail.com)

Instructors may use a course newsgroup to communicate with their students. For example, the newsgroup for CPSC 415 is ubc.courses.cpsc.415.

SPAM: See our department email page for information on spam filtering. By default, it is turned on for all undergrads.

There are a number of ways to access your undergraduate email and newsgroups. The CPSC department supports Thunderbird, which is an emailer and newsreader all wrapped into one, and which runs on OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc...

Install Thunderbird

You may also find command-line applications such as pine useful (when connecting remotely via Xshell).