WebMail problem fixed, now allowing more connections and speed
Students and faculty who use the WebMail interface probably noticed it was down Tuesday and Wednesday but is currently running competently.
Kim Marshall, director of Networking and Computer Services, said, “We were trying to increase the number of connections WebMail could handle and make it quicker.”
He said when they make changes to improve WebMail, they cannot be completely sure what will happen until students log in and put pressure on the system.
After working around the clock since the problem was discovered, WebMail was running again on Wednesday morning, from about 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. But as soon as a large number of users started accessing it, the system started dropping connections again.
“We did not intend to disrupt service or cause hardship,” Marshall said. “We did our best to get it back as fast as we could.”
Stephen Funk, Help Desk supervisor, said the Help Desk received about 200 calls and e-mails concerning the WebMail issue.
“Most people were wondering when it would be back up, and some wanted an explanation,” he said. “A few were frustrated, but most were patient and understanding.”
Marshall said, “We’re back where we were before the break, plus a little better.”
After working with Hewlett Packard’s Software Support to resolve the problem, Marshall said they thought the problem may be attributed to the fault of a utility, but further analysis is needed before they will know for sure what caused the problem.
Another issue that many e-mail users are dealing with is the amount of spam delivered to their inbox. Bob Bayn, associate director of Networking and Computing Services, said there are some extra things one can do to control spam on a cc.usu.edu account.
Utah State University employs an open-source software product called SpamAssassin to tag what might be spam. Users see questionable messages marked with “{SPAM?}” at the beginning of their subject lines.
Bayn said if a user wants to control the spam coming in, he should go to the WebMail login page (webmail.usu.edu) and click on “Build A Simple E-mail Filter on your cc.usu.edu account.”
There are quite a few options listed to filter out unwanted e-mail, but users need to keep a fundamental principle in mind: Filtering throws away certain messages. The receiver and the sender never know they were thrown away.
The first thing to do when setting up a filter is to type in character strings or e-mail addresses that should always be accepted. In some cases, e-mail lists and newsletters a user is subscribed to might be marked as spam when the client wants to get them.
If, for example, an individual wants to get mailing lists from a fishing club, he might type in “fish” or the sender’s e-mail address. These filters only look at the “Subject” line and the “From” line.
Clients can also do the opposite and have the filter always reject e-mails with certain words or from certain e-mail addresses.
Bayn said, “The main problem I see is that people think in terms of words, not in character strings.”
For example, he said if you tell the filter to block “mortgage” it will also reject “mortgages,” because it has the word “mortgage” in it. Some people tell the filter to reject a word like “won.” They don’t realize words like “wonderful” may be rejected.
An easier filter is to have the program throw away all the porn messages or all of the spam messages.
The porn option is the more conservative of the two. It blocks out messages tagged as being spam and porn, he said.
“I’ve never heard of anyone complain of a message marked both spam and porn that wasn’t spam,” Bayn said.
The second option “is a little bit risky,” Bayn said. “You might lose something.”
He also said the system isn’t perfect, and a user might still get some spam after setting the filter.
“We are looking at more enhancements. I encourage people who have already set up filters to come back and see if there are new features,” Bayn said.
The other problem users run into is an accumulation of old e-mail. This slows down the cc.usu.edu account. Users are encouraged to click on “Account Management” on the WebMail login page and have the system delete messages that are a certain number of days old.
–dhegsted@cc.usu.edu