Since I help maintain IST’s mailservices system, to which Erick Engelke refers in his article, I would like to respond.
As Erick observers, we deal with a lot of e-mail. The mailservices system, a mailbox server as well as a gateway for many on-campus systems (including engmail and Connect), processes roughly 1.5 million incoming connections per day. One third of those connections results in mail to deliver; the other two thirds are systems probing ours, blacklisted systems that we refuse to talk to, systems trying to pass a virus that we refuse, connections dropped because of greylisting, and so on. Thus, we end up with some hundreds of thousands of messages to deliver, over half of which are spam — and perhaps half of these messages are promptly forwarded off campus.
From this point on, mailservices just marks the headers of suspected spam messages, and passes them on. Engineering allowed spamassassin to discard some messages before delivery to the user, but IST puts them in a SPAM folder; a choice that the recipient can override. Although spam rates (as a percentage of total) have climbed steadily in the last few years, we’re in a lull at the moment, and, the total amount of mail UW is seeing has dipped recently — so the amount of spam received is no worse than before.
Erick mentioned that `Under testing Engineering […] found [greylisting-induced] delays rendered Email effectively useless.’ IST still finds greylisting surprisingly effective. Of the approximately 50,000 e-mail addresses that mailservices delivers for, about 50 (one per thousand) are exempted from greylisting. Significant delays are rare — especially since we exempt mail from Gmail, Facebook, various universities, and others. However, as Erick himself observes, e-mail is not a key method of communication amongst students, so this is all somewhat moot.
Within the last year IST investigated whether UW should move students’ e-mail to Gmail, Live@Edu, or similar. The answer was essentially that there is currently no point: our system works reasonably well, and those who want to use something else can. So, we’ll wait another year and then look again. However, UW will never be able to offer the collaborative tools those systems offer, and for those tools, we may move. This is a different issue to e-mail: we have e-mail; we’d move for something new, which happens to include e-mail.
Erick mentions the `20 server class computers’ that make up mailservices. These form a Linux cluster, the principle of which is to have more, cheaper, computers, for greater redundancy. So, we can weather failures and upgrades without impacting service. In fact, we’re currently replacing some five year old hardware with newer equipment, with no downtime. This is a low maintenance and fairly cheap cluster that has practically run itself for years. The low cost means there’s not much to save by outsourcing e-mail.
A comment on privacy: the idea that data that remains on servers in Canada is in some way safer from prying American eyes than data in the US is misleading. The Canadian and US governments have reciprocal agreements allowing easy access to the other’s systems, so if ‘the authorities’ want something in either of those places, they will get it. If you’re worried about industrial espionage or similar, having your data in Canada is no guarantee that it’s safer.
The majority of students are now on mailservices, and by the end of this term possibly all students will be. Alumni may be next. We have had few complaints from everyone involved so far, and trust it will be the same for Engineering.
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