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We have made life confusing - our apologies! When the desktop Unix and AFS home directory service was set up, we foresaw putting mail ``inboxes'' in AFS. This could be done by sending mail to userid@afsmail.cern.ch.
After some experience with this and observing usage patterns, it became clear that this solution was not going to scale to a community as large as CERN, due to the way caching works in AFS. There would simply be too much network traffic. We therefore had to come up with an alternative solution, which is the MailServer.
People who are already using afsmail will have to move to the MailServer at some point in time, but there is no immediate pressure to do so. Our highest priority for the moment is to move users away from CERNVM mail.
People still using CERNVM mail should go directly to the MailServer, not afsmail. Many people, just starting to use Unix for their email, had their accounts created some time ago, many as a result of mass registration. The email configuration they got at the time may not be the right one for today.
So, if you are sure that you have been registered on the MailServer and you want to use pine to handle your mail, before you start, issue the command ``mailmigrate'' which will ensure that your pine configuration file (.pinerc) and forward file (.forward) are correctly set for using the MailServer.