| Present: | P. Hazel, P. Stewart, B.K. Omotani, K.M. Jeary, D.P. Carter, C.E. Thompson, R. Stratford, R.J. Dowling. |
Date of next meeting: Wednesday 15th January 2003 at 11:15 in Au310
Opinions were expressed that more needs to be done to convince users that the Computing Service is not just ignoring the spam problem. Some documentation will be produced explaining the current filtering arrangements and the plans for the next generation of content based filtering. Concern was expressed that the arms race between spammers and automatic spam filtering software is ultimately untenable: as time proceeds spam will evolve in order to evade content based filtering.
The eventual solution for users who object strongly to junk email may have to be some kind of opt in regime where incoming mail to an account from external sources is blocked by default and the user has to take some action in order to allow through mail from a given domain. Some members of the Computing Service already have rudimentary filters of this kind based on Exim user filter files (a fairly blunt tool). Clearly this will require additional work on the part of each user concerned, and there may be support implications if a large number of people choose to adopt such measures.
The Webmail interface has overtaken telnet/SSH in terms of number of active users (9,500 versus 9,100 active users in a seven day period). It still trails slightly in terms of number of actual login sessions per day. (21741 versus 23734). The code is in currently in test for use at three other Universities.
Hermes is bearing up well to the ever increasing load and the current implementation should see us through to the end of the academic year. Work on the Cyrus IMAP server for the next generation of Hermes is taking a little longer than hoped, but a pilot scheme early in 2003 still looks viable. Three additional PPSW systems have been installed and are now ready for Mailscanner testing.
Washington are up to their fifth test pre-release of Pine 4.50 (rather more than normal). It is unlikely that a stable version will be available and well tested in time for Christmas.
One (very small) beneficial side effect of a recent outbreak of the Braid worm is that it has flushed out a number of systems running Outlook Express 5.5 without correct patches or virus protection.
Large per user quotas have been been introduced as a backstop to prevent the /var/mail "partition" from overflowing.
Institution Liaison have a gentle ongoing campaign to try and eliminate small mail domains which cover only some fraction of an institution. One small complicating factor is the need for contact address used by the managed web service. "webmaster" is the traditional name for this function, but this can only be used where the name of the managed Web server corresponds to a top level domain. Instead webmasters have to be encouraged to set up role addresses in the mail domain for the parent institution or as @lists addresses.
The University Library plan to replace their existing collection of domains with a single managed mail domain for lib.cam.ac.uk.
DPC 2002-11-13