MDCM_100 14-March-2002

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE COMPUTING SERVICE

Minutes of the 100th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 14th March 2002

Present:

B. Landy, D.P. Carter, P. Hazel, C.J. Jardine, K.M. Jeary, R. Mee, B.K. Omotani, A.A. Schneider, R.J. Smith, P. Stewart, A.J.M. Stoneley

Date of next meeting: Wednesday 1st May 2002 at 11:15 in Au310

1. Naive telnet users and attachments

Some people who run Pine on Hermes are confused that attachments are saved on Hermes rather than their local disk. "webmail.hermes" will be advertised as an alternative.

2. Webmail interface

Only a small amount of work has taken place on the Webmail interface since the previous meeting.

A number of silly little bugs have been fixed, including one rather nasty bug which caused the login session to crash after certain types of messages had been (successfully) sent.
An SSL session cache has been added, improving efficiency for both the server and browsers.
A theme engine providing different colour schemes has been added, although this is not yet visible through User Preferences.
The help text is almost finished.

We are currently seeing around 650 to 700 user logins a day to "webmail.hermes" This contrasts to around 300 logins a day right after the full pilot service was announced.

3. Attachment filter on Hermes

The executable attachment filter is still in place on Hermes. A small bug in Exim meant that messages which contained ASCII NUL characters were not being picked up correctly. This has been resolved.

4. User Agents

Pine 4.44 has been released as an experimental option on the Hermes menu system.

5. Hermes and PPSW

"webmail2.hermes" is running as a test system for PPSW on Linux/PC hardware. It should be rolled out as a fifth PPSW system sometime soon.

An IMAP and POP proxy server has been written for Hermes. This includes SSL/TLS and STARTTLS support and the same SSL session cache that is used by the Webmail interface.

Work to customise the Cyrus IMAP server (an existing high performance blackbox IMAP server) to work well in our environment has commenced: a great deal of work remains. The goal is to make the migration from Unix mailboxes to an array of black box servers as transparent as possible for IMAP, POP and Webmail users. Some change is inevitable for telnet/SSH users as the mailstore will become partitioned off from the Unix filestore.

6. Exim 4

Exim 4 has now been officially released.

DPC 2002-03-14