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Hermes news |
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May request upgrades via a web form.
Until the message store upgrade during the Michaelmas Term, there
was a 32 bit limit on upgraded quotas (i.e. 4GB) but this has now been
lifted.
Fixed for all users.
Beware that this is bigger than most other academic and free email
services, so messages that are delivered OK within the University may
be rejected by remote sites.
Our webmail software is called Prayer, because it's a response to
Oxford's webmail software WING.
Chinese for email, according to Google
Prayer is now UTF-8 internally, so supports practically everything
instead of just ISO 8858-1.
Some recent spam
Sadly I couldn't find any Thai
Old UW-IMAP model
Directories vs. mailboxes
New cyrus model
Nested folders
What most desktop MUAs expect
Will allow us to eliminate some patches from Cyrus
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Investigating problems
- date & time
- sender, recipients
- IP address & hostname
- error messages
- not subject
- queries to help-desk@ucs
- no queries from 3rd parties
- (COs please CC: relevant user)
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Many users complain of email problems but never provide details
when we ask for them, so we are unable to investigate.
Nearly 4GB logs per day - 25 million lines.
Specific information is necessary.
We can recover email lost within the last week or so.
Requests to help-desk@ucs as usual.
We only need to know the name of the mailbox and the rough time of
the loss - our recovery tools don't expose message contents.
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Email access in absentia
- Handled by user-admin, not postmaster
- Must be signed off by HoD or similar
- User's password is reset
- Work-related email manually forwarded elsewhere
- Vacation message installed to inform others of situation
- Relatives / executors given access after death
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They try not to look at personal email, though this can be
difficult to get right, and they try to go in to the account only
once.
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Rôle addresses
| reception@ucs | ⇒ | ucs@hermes |
| unix-support@ucs | ⇒ | cs-unix-support@lists |
| mail-support@ucs | ⇒ | dpc22@cam, fanf2@cam |
| help-desk@ucs | ⇒ | help-desk@helpdesk.csx |
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Shared hermes account - useful if some people handling the email
work part-time - ad-hoc ticketing system.
Mailing list - useful to avoid having to use multiple accounts;
works OK if staff are full-time and disciplined about CC:ing the role
address.
Managed mail domain alias - poor man's mailing list. Generally best
avoided.
You might want to set up a ticketing system like RT. We can provide
managed mail domain "escape routes" for this kind of
purpose.
Shared Hermes account is just like a normal Hermes account
except that it has no @cam address, only an @hermes address.
You need to tweak Prayer's defaults.
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vanity domains
- managed zone service
- managed web server
- managed mail domain
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long-form domains |
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90 messages per second is 7.8 million per day.
6 messages per second is 0.5 million per day.
Spam (according to SpamAssassin) is 25% weekdays 33% weekends.
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Anti-Spam
- Protocol conformance checks (<5%)
- DNS blacklists: Spamhaus ZEN and MAPS RBL+ (>90%)
- Email address verification (<5%)
- Anti-virus: McAfee and ClamAV (negligible)
- SpamAssassin (about 90% of the rest)
- (optional) in-MUA filter
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Based on my email for the last week, SpamAssassin scored 3900
messages as spam and missed about 300.
