Minutes of the 126th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 29th June 2005

Date of next meeting: 10th August 2005 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

26 mailing lists have been moved across to the Mailman test system, including a few large society lists. Mailman has a number of problems involving the bounce processing and list archives. The list managers interface is also rather complex. We plan to spend some time over the summer looking at an alternative mailing list manager (Sympa) before committing ourselves to Mailman as a full service.

The existing Hermes mailstore is now 86% full. Two new systems with SATA disks (using Native Command Queueing) have been installed: each provides 3.5 TBytes of mailstore.

PPSW-9 was unavailable for about 15 minutes on Friday 24th June. The machine initiated a clean shutdown as if the front panel power button had been pressed. It is not clear whether someone pressed this button by accident or if a hardware fault was the cause.

2. Plaintext access to Hermes

Telnet, FTP and rlogin access to Hermes will be removed on or around Monday 4th July. A reminder will be sent to the appropriate mailing lists and newsgroups.

3. Cammail

The old rsh and ssh cammail interface to Jackdaw will be removed shortly. It will still be available to Hermes for the 2hermes utility.

4. The future of CUS

A review of CUS has begun. At the moment 315 @cam addresses are left pointing to CUS.

5. Hotmail and SenderID

Hotmail plan to start flagging messages as potential spam when the return path address does not advertise SenderID information. This is an attempt by Microsoft to create a defacto standard: SenderID is not widely used, and like SPF it breaks message forwarding.