Date of next meeting: Wednesday 9th April 2003 at 11:15 in Au310
There has been a request for a Kiosk Mode for the Webmail interface where links to other pages are disabled.
Work on the next generation Hermes architecture is continuing at about the expected rate: we are almost ready to purchase the first block of hardware for live testing. The next generation architecture will use the Sieve filter language rather than Exim filter files: Sieve has the advantage that it is a fairly widely used standard and that it was designed to work with the LMTP protocol (so we can offload Exim mail queues onto PPSW). This change should hopefully be largely transparent to the vast majority of Hermes users who only use the Webmail interface and menu system frontend to set up mail filtering, redirection and vacation messages.
Mulberry 3 is now available. However, demand for Mulberry within the University appears to be diminishing.
The Mailscanner filtering project has been delayed by staff sickness: current progress is unknown.
Various people reported increasing levels of spam, especially to common role addresses such as postmaster and cert (probably just a consequence of these addresses being advertised widely on Web pages).
Concern was expressed about people on the University Network submitting messages incorrectly to the Spamcop DNS black list either by accident or malice. Spamcop is unusual in that it automatically blacklists IP addresses for a short period of time (the IP address only remains blacklisted if multiple copies of a message are submitted from different sources).
This allows quite a lot of potential for false positives and abuse. One of the three PPSW systems was blacklisted for about 40 minutes on 21st February because a Hermes user submitted a spam message to Spamcop. This message had been deliberately mutilated in a naive attempt to remove personal data from the message. Fortunately, only a small number of people (including one small research group within the University) appear to use the spamcop database at the moment.
An additional amusement is that Spamcop have been targeted by irate spammers who send out forged spam messages which look like an attempt by Spamcop to extort money.
DPC 2003-02-27