Minutes of the 125th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 18th May 2005

Date of next meeting: 29th June 2005 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

The new PPSW systems are now all live and the existing machines have been decommissioned. Two of the old PPSW systems have been recycled as list servers (master and replica) with a copy of the old list system and a couple of Mailman test lists.

On Saturday 9th April all seven PPSW systems were out of action for a number of hours. A bug in the spam scoring software caused the machines to all run out of memory. A workaround has been applied to Mailscanner to stop this happening again.

2. Plaintext access to Hermes

The warning messages for plaintext access to Hermes (telnet/rlogin, FTP and HTTP) are all now in place. So is the rachet mechanism that we plan to use for plaintext IMAP and POP access next year. Institutions running their own Webmail gateways which rely on plaintext IMAP connections to Hermes have been warned.

A purely https Webmail service will not be indexed by the current Web search engine. We need to make sure that the documentation for Hermes Webmail has prominent links to the Webmail login page.

3. Sober Q

On Saturday 14th May the latest Sober virus turned into a spam zombie, generating huge numbers of spam messages from infected home computers. The two existing RBL lists used to spot dialup systems and infected computers struggled to keep pace. FANF plans to try out an additional RBL list (NJABL) which should have a more comprehensive list of dialup and ADSL systems. This may increase the importance of SMTP AUTH.