Minutes of the 110th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 27th August 2003

Date of next meeting: 1st October 2003 at 11:15 in C304

1. Decommissioning IMAP and POP on CUS

A provisional schedule has been drawn up, contingent on successful rollout of the new Hermes system and the availability of suitable transfer tools.

2. Bounce message for cancelled users

The page references by the bounce message has not yet been updated. DPC will liaise with SP.

3. Hermes and PPSW

Full virus scanning was rolled out on PPSW on 21st August in response to the Sobig.f virus. (Hermes had been blackholing the virus for the previous 48 hours). The meeting thanked Tony Finch who returned early from his holiday to help watch over things after the rollout. The virus scanner identified 365,000 messages containing email worms known to forge sender addresses (mostly Sobig.f) in the 10 days leading up to 27th August.

Spam scoring on PPSW is now enhanced by using various DNS blacklists and the Razor distributed checksum database. In addition, Exim instead now uses the Spamhaus DNS Blacklist in addition to the Janet slave of the original mail-abuse blacklist.

The five live PPSW systems processed 670,000 mail messages on 21st August at the peak of the Sobig.f outbreak, a record. This is also close to the operational limit for the existing hardware with full virus scanning and spam scoring switched on.

So far 500 people have been moved to the Cyrus mailstore on Hermes. The plan is to move everyone with a quota larger than the 10 MByte default by the second week in September, and to move this years undergraduate intake as soon as they are registered on Hermes.