You can read email from the Macintoshes in the lab using NCSA telnet. You can often start up telnet by clicking on the apple in the upper left hand corner, selecting the "Recent Applications" submenu, and selecting telnet from that menu. That works if anyone has run telnet recently. Otherwise, you will have to find it on the CCSO server.

Using telnet you can open up a connection to "students.cso.uiuc.edu", login, and read your email.