Minutes of the 105th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 15th January 2003

Date of next meeting: Wednesday 26th February 2003 at 11:15 in Au310

1. Publicity regarding our efforts on spam

Tony Finch has written a brief Newsletter article outlining the current status quo and our plans for spam filtering using Mailscanner.

2. Webmail interface

Prayer was announced on the UK mail managers list by a happy customer (Judy Angel of Hertfordshire University). This led to a number of email enquires.

3. Hermes and PPSW

Work on the next generation Hermes architecture is proceeding well, though taking a little longer than hoped. Trials for Mailscanner on PPSW should start shortly: it may take some time for the engine to be tuned correctly for our environment

4. User Agents

Pine 4.52 has just been released: the 4.5X series still appear to be rather unstable with crash bugs reported on the development mailing list.

There appears to be increasing pressure to support Outlook and Outlook Express.

5. CUS

The parts of the Hermes menu system which provide support for setting up Exim user filter files are being ported to CUS.

There was a short discussion about the interaction between Mailscanner on PPSW and the mail system on CUS. The conclusion was that CUS should probably hub incoming and outgoing mail through PPSW (to be approved by the CUSP meeting), with the possibility of special routes for other large mail systems within Cambridge. The fate of the DNS A record for "smtp.cus.cam.ac.uk" is less clear, especially given the ongoing campaign to phase out all remote MUA access to CUS.

6. Mail in Cambridge

A number of institutions who have acquired unfortunate abbreviated domain names from the NRS days (e.g: joh.cam.ac.uk) have asked about the possibility of migrating to more sensible names. This is never easy once a mail domain name is well established, given the potential for confusion amongst correspondents and in particular automatons such as mailing lists. Experience suggests that both forms of domain would have to be maintained indefinitely and that any attempt to rewrite addresses is likely to meet resistance from users (and enforced automatic rewriting causes its own problems where moderated lists are involved). The consensus was that such migrations should be discouraged.

7. Spam

CUS has recently seen dictionary based attacks, apparently attempting to generate lists of valid email addresses. Some form of technical countermeasure may be possible if this becomes an outgoing problem (e.g: a tar pit for messages which contain lots of invalid recipients).

One specific CUS user has been bombarded with spam messages from random systems, including dialup nodes. The messages in question all appear to be mail bounces, but without the normal explanatory text associated with a mail delivery report. One speculation was that this might be collateral damage from spam sent through some kind of gateway or proxy system.