Minutes of the 107th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 9th April 2003

Date of next meeting: 4th June 2003 at 11:15 in Au310

1. Cantab.net

There was a user request that the Alumni mail service run by the development office should be mentioned in bounce messages from Computing Service mail systems. We have previously resisted such suggestions because of concern about the reliability of this service and the weak authentication mechanisms that it uses to set up new accounts. This situation doesn't appear to have improved (the service is running unattended at the moment). A number of colleges appear to be setting up their own, independent, alumni mail services.

The conclusion was that we probably do need to add additional information to bounce messages, but that it should not be specific, either to cantab.net or to any of the Colleges' services. It was suggested that a reference to the URL of the page that gives advice to those leaving Cambridge should be enough.

2. Hermes and PPSW

The first block of hardware for the next generation of Hermes has been purchased and installed. Live testing should start shortly.

3. Spam

The Mailscanner filtering project appears to be coming to a conclusion, though user interfaces to the filtering regime are still required. A second Newsletter article has been written.

4. Disclaimers in Messages Footers

The subject of quasi-legal disclaimers in mail messages (typically added automatically by the sending mail system) was brought up. The consensus was that such statements have no legal standing but a high annoyance factor and the potential to interfere with normal communication if taken at face value. It was agreed that these statements should be discouraged for local mail systems and that the first step should be a short item for the next Newsletter and the current CS documentation.