| Present: | P. Hazel, A.A. Schneider, K.M. Jeary, R.J. Dowling, B.K. Omotani, F.A.N. Finch, C.E. Thompson. D.P. Carter, J.M. Wilkins, R. Stratford, C.J. Jardine |
Date of next meeting: 17th December 2003 at 11:15 in C304
The backup spooling system for Hermes (a 2U Intel server attached to a 4 TByte disk array and an LTO-2 tape stacker with two drives) has been installed and is now operational.
8000 users have been moved to the new Hermes mail store to date. The next batch scheduled to be moved are undergraduates and postgraduates who arrived in or before 2001 (6500 users in total).
A revised Exim configuration for PPSW (including TLS support) is in testing and will be rolled out at a suitable quiet time.
smtp.cus.cam.ac.uk has been moved to point at PPSW. A number of users have misconfigured user agents which are still sending messages to the actual CUS system: the most common configuration error appears to be people who have pop.cus.cam.ac.uk as the name of their SMTP server.
The return size limit set of delivery reports has been reduced from 100 KBytes (the Exim default) to 10 KBytes on Hermes, PPSW and the CUS.
The amount of the message body visible for system and user filtering on CUS has been increased to 5000 bytes (matching the configuration which was already in place on Hermes).
A request was received for an online archive of messages sent to @lists mailing lists. This has been added to the WishList for the replacement list system which we hope to work on during 2004.
Once a year JML runs email addresses which appear in the printed Telephone Directory through a sanity filter to try and spot obviously bogus email addresses. It was suggested that a snapshot of the managed mail domain system might be useful to improve the data quality further.
The question of people wishing to conceal the mail last read information from finger was raised. This is possible on both the old and new Hermes mailstore, however no user interface is currently available: this has to be done manually by the system administrator.
The Cyrus mailstore provides a facility named "plus addressing" where email addresses of the form CRSid+mailbox are delivered to the nominated user with the option of additional filtering. This can work in one of two ways:
Either of these approaches would require additional infrastructure (probably on the Webmail system) in order to enable server side filtering. Plus addressing isn't useful to people who use POP mail user agents: the single instance store used by Cyrus means that the plus addresses don't appear in the body of the delivered message where POP clients could see them.
Plus addressing is commonly used to filter mail from mailing lists (though filtering on return path is typically almost as reliable). A problem with this is that closed and moderated mailing lists filter on the envelope from address, which has to be set up appropriately for each message. This is not always possible, in particular PINE on Hermes and the Webmail interface both currently fix the envelope sender address to be user@hermes.cam.ac.uk. A second application of plus addressing is limited duration email addresses which are be passed out to individuals or posted on newgroups but are later revoked. The Cyrus implementation of plus addressing wasn't designed with this in mind: messages which cannot be delivered to a given target folder are not bounced, they end up in the user's inbox. Consequently this would have to be implemented using explicit "discard" clauses in user Sieve files.
User demand for plus addressing is currently unknown, but is unlikely to be very high given the handful of people who set up complex filters on either the old or new Hermes message stores. The consensus of the MDCM was that while plus addressing might be useful to a small number of people, the additional infrastructure required to make it work probably isn't justified at the current time. The MDCM will come back and review the situation in a couple of years' time.
Extensions to the @cam.ac.uk address scheme are in the pipeline and will be discussed at the next MDCM.
An SSL enabled version of Mulberry is now available.
The MDCM thanked Andrew Schneider for the valuable work that he has put in over the last decade as postmaster@cam.ac.uk.
DPC 2003-11-12