IRCnet.org's mail system is probably one of the most simple mail systems
you will ever come into contact with. Quite simply, any mail sent to any
address at the ircnet.org server, will be delivered to our mail system
and accessable to anybody who wants to read it. There are no passwords
and no addresses need to be created in advance, you can tell somebody to
send you mail here and you can access it whenever you want. Some examples
of valid addresses are:
mynickname@ircnet.org
or smelly.cat@ircnet.org
You pickup the mail by going to http://mail.ircnet.org/ and typing
the name you picked into the little white box (in these examples, you
would type: mynickname or smelly.cat )
There are quite a few:
The mail will only hang around for 2 days. After that, it is gone. You can't delete mail yourself, it is all automatic.
Some mail addresses are actually reserved, things like "postmaster" and a few personal names that get delivered elsewhere. If you check mail for one of these accounts the system will simply say: "Mail to this account cannot be read via this system"
The mail that comes into the system is stripped to about 200 lines and no attachments are allowed.
Email addresses must conform to a correct format for an email address so stick with letters, numbers and dot, dash or underscore characters. Try and keep the length below 32 characters in length too.
Obviously, anybody who wants to can read the mail if they know who it has been sent to. There is no privacy here and accounts cannot currently be reserved in any way unless you are officially involved with IRCnet.
This system comes with no guarantees and no expectations of a quality of service. In this respect it is much like IRC itself. Saying that, it does seem to work pretty well.
Why not? Can you think of a better way?
IRCnet has always prided itself as being a very anarchistic network and so it seemed logical to have a very anarchistic mail system to go along with it. It is highly likely we may well start to allow some extra features soon however, if you want a full blown mail system try hotmail or something, this one is just here for quick and easy convenience.
As part of trying to keep this system clean, we have added a button that allows you to flag things for the attention of the management. If a mailbox looks like it is being used for Spam responses, or there is something that looks decidedly illegal in a message then you can press this to report it to us. Please use your judgement and don't do this unless it is really required though.
The mailer that the IRCnet mail system runs on is called Scylla after the Goddess who had a habit of randomly collecting everything that floated past her and gobbling it all up. You can get more information by reading Homer's Odyssey or, if you are too lazy you could just look here.
The Scylla mail system was written for Shonky Internet by Scramworks.