Minutes of the 116th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 28th April 2004.

Date of next meeting: 9th June 2004 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

All but 19 people have now been moved to the new Hermes mailstore (new accounts are still being moved manually, on a weekly basis). The remaining cases are almost all people with Exim filter files: support for filter files is to due to be removed later this year. Around 25,500 cancelled Hermes accounts were destroyed on 16th April, leaving 11 GBytes of data (mostly inactive) on the two old NetApps.

The limit on outgoing messages through smtp.hermes has been increased to 10 MBytes to match the incoming limit. PPSW is currently running at reduced capacity as we switch to SuSE and upgrade the Mailscanner software. Replacement hardware for the Hermes telnet/SSH service has been delivered.

2. Decomissioning IMAP and POP on CUS

The initial surge of people migrating to Hermes once the 2hermes command became available has died down. Remaining users will need regular reminders that the IMAP and POP service is due to be withdrawn and that migration tools are available.

3. Purging spam folders

A Cyrus utility program allows us to delete all mail delivered to a named folder before a given time. This makes it easy to implement a global timeout for mail stored in the special "spam" folder. A per user tunable limit is possible as a later refinement, but would require additional work to the webmail interface. It was proposed that we start with a 2 month global limit to see how well that works: an announcement will be made.

4. Mailing lists

An overhaul of the @lists system is long overdue. The first stage will be discussion within the CS (specifically the MDCM and TUS) to determine features that we need and the useful properties of the existing system that we would like to keep.

5. Google Gmail

It was noted that Google are planning to release a free Webmail service with large (1 GByte) quotas to compete with Yahoo and Hotmail. "Gmail" is currently in a six month restricted beta program. Google plan to finance this service through targeting advertising: concerns have been raised about the privacy issues involved. However, if it takes off it will clearly raise expectations for existing Email services.

6. Hermes Webmail

The Hermes Webmail service does not provide a means of looking up or changing @cam redirections (this is rather involved given the authentication scheme used by the current @cam system). This functionally will be provided in due course by the Raven protected Web interface for @cam redirection on Jackdaw.

People should be encouraged to use HTTPS rather than HTTP to Hermes. It looks like there is sufficient spare capacity on the current hardware.