Grex provides free email accounts to anyone who wants one. This service is made available in the spirit of improving people's ability to communicate with each other.
Once you have a validated Grex account, your E-mail address is either accountname@grex.org or accountname@cyberspace.org. You may use whichever address you prefer.
Grex offers POP3 and IMAP E-mail connections for use with an E-mail client supporting either of those protocols. Grex requires a secure connection for this to work. As an example, here's how to connect with IMAP from your local computer running an e-mail client, such as Thunderbird: Tell your client to use grex.org or cyberspace.org as the e-mail server. Connect on port 143 with STARTTLS (SSL/TLS and port 993 will also work) for security, and use your Grex username and password to authenticate.
Grex does not support Web-based mail right now.
You may also use a text terminal to read or send E-mail from Grex. To do this, you can SSH to Grex. Note: this link will only work if your browser supports the SSH protocol or if your browser has been configured to start an SSH client. If it doesn't work, you may need to change your browser's preferences, or in some cases, download an SSH client application program.
Once you have connected by SSH and logged in, you can use any of the mail clients available on Grex. Currently, we support alpine, elm, mutt, nmh, and mail. We will consider installing other programs, upon request.
This process of connecting to read mail can be greatly simplified and made more secure by the use of public-key cryptography with SSH. SSH is a secure means of communication because it uses data encryption.
E-mail is a very popular service, and so it is necessary for Grex to establish an acceptable use policy for E-mail. Ideally, we would not like to have many rules, but we have found that we need to have a few in order to assure the smooth flow of mail to so many users.
Acceptable Use Policy for Grex E-mail
- Do not send unsolicited or unwanted mail. This includes mail intended to harass other users.
- Do not send or encourage anyone to send you messages longer than 100k. Usually mail that large contains an attached file, often a binary file. If you must send or receive attachments, make sure that they are small and infrequent.
- If you choose to have your mail forwarded to another machine, you must limit the forwarding to a single site. Do not use the forwarding service to setup a mailing list.
- If forwarding mail, do not forward any bulk mail. Bulk mail is mail that comes from a list server. Instead, you must unsubscribe your Grex account from the list server, and subscribe to the list from where you wish to receive your mail.
- Read your mail regularly. If you are receiving mail from a list server that you do not have time to read, unsubscribe from the mailing list. If your mailbox gets too big, your mail will bounce.
Users interested in using other mail clients should send email to help@grex.org.