Services offered by Zepler.net

Zepler.net offers a variety of services to alumni of Southampton University's ECS Department, and aims to provide new ones in the future.

Current services offered are:

• Email forwarding for life
• Web forwarding for life
• Alumni/ECS news and events
• Zepler.net aliases
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server

Email Forwarding

What is it?

Zepler.net offers a lifetime email forwarding service to all ECS alumni. This address will be the same as your former ECS mail ID, but at the domain zepler.net. So for example if your address was abc102@ecs.soton.ac.uk, your alumni email address would be abc102@zepler.net.

Why use it?

The advantage of using an account at zepler.net is that you can give people an email address which you know will permanently exist, whilst the actual mail account you use may change.
This is especially useful for those in their final year of study, since their @ecs.soton.ac.uk address will expire when they graduate, this can give out their @zepler.net address, and have it forward to @ecs.soton.ac.uk until they graduate, then change it afterwards.

Virus scanning and spam detection

All email passed through zepler.net will also be scanned for potential viruses, and any suspected spam will be tagged as such, allowing for easy spam filtering.
Any suspected spam will have {SPAM?} inserted before the subject, and mail suspected of containing a virus will have {VIRUS?} inserted in the subject field.

In addition, we now offer an automatic spam deletion service. This lets you set a spam threshold above which spam will automatically be deleted on the server, rather than using up your bandwidth by still delivering it to you. Please see the automatic spam deletion page for more details.

Important: please do NOT report any spam that gets through the zepler.net MailScanner to sites such as SpamCop or other spam reporting services. All mail will appear to come from zepler.net itself, and there's a chance that zepler.net could be mistaken for the spammer.

Spam and virus checking provided by

Web Forwarding

What is it?

You will get a zepler.net url which when visited will redirect to the site of your choice. Again this will be tied to the username you had at ECS, for example user abc102 will have the url http://www.zepler.net/~abc102, which they can set to forward to the site of their choice.

Why use it?

For similar reasons to having an email address for life mentioned above. This is especially useful if you maintain a home page, as people who knew you from the ECS dept. could find your page just by looking at http://www.zepler.net/~yourusername, no matter where you actually host the site.

Alumni/ECS news and events

Zepler.net will also present news and events relevant to ECS alumni. This will include information about any class reunions or public ECS events that may occur, as well as any other major departmental news.

Zepler.net alias

What is it?

All zepler.net users are allowed one alias to their account. This allows you to be contacted at fooalias@zepler.net as well as foo02@zepler.net in the case of a user who has the username foo02 and the alias fooalias. The same applies to web forwarding, www.zepler.net/~fooalias will point to the same place as www.zepler.net/~foo02.
Note: Once you have created an alias, it cannot be changed.

What aliases are allowed?

Anything over 6 characters, and which doesn't look like an ECS user id should be fine. An alias such as steve looks fine in theory, but it's possible that in future someone with the initials S.T.E.V.E. could join ECS in future.
In addition, no key system names will be allowed, i.e. webmaster, root, admin etc. are not valid aliases.

IRC Server

What is it?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is basically a form of internet chat. The server run here is intended to be used for ECS alumni to keep in touch and chat with each other when online.
For more information on IRC, clients and commands, have a look at www.irc.net, or search Google for irc.

How do I use it?

You can connect to irc.zepler.net (port 6667) using any irc client, and use it like any other irc service. Alternatively, a web based irc applet is provided here, allowing the use of the irc service through any web browser. Using a dedicated irc client is preferable to using the web applet though, as it will no doubt be faster and have many more features.
In case of problems contact ircadmin@zepler.net.

What channels are there?

At the moment there is one channel called #soton which is the default for people using the irc web applet. You are free to create/use any channel names you like however. If any channels become popular, or are used a lot by a certain year group, mail ircadmin@zepler.net with details, and the channel name will be added to this page.