Welcome!

This special edition of our Bits-n-Bytes newsletter is intended to give you an update on four critical items that will affect your computing experiences both here and at home. In this newsletter, you will find updates about Vista, Daylight Savings Time, Lotus, and our network. We are asking the entire community to read this newsletter carefully and to call our Help Desk with any questions.

By now, you should have seen several emails regarding problems with our Lotus email system and some measures we are putting in place to make Lotus run more efficiently. Quite simply the amount of email we receive and send in a day has more than quadrupled over the last 4 years. Just from external users alone, we receive about 1 million emails daily and over 90% of that email is SPAM. This does not include the email that is sent out from our campus users daily or the amount of email that is sent between Lotus users.

Our Lotus email system was sized more than adequately for our load of three years ago, and no one could have predicted this exponential increase.

We have developed a plan to incrementally make changes to our Lotus system on campus to improve its efficiency. Some of these changes have already been implemented as follows:

• Changing the anti-virus program for Lotus to a newer, more efficient program.


• Contacting the top 100 email users to cut-down on their email storage and free up system space.


• Providing documentation on how you can store email without storing attachments in Lotus. Attachments should be stored on your hard drive.


• Making changes in the Barracuda SPAM filtering program to eliminate '[BULK]' email from reaching Lotus and only storing your quarantined email for 15 days before automatic deletion.

We are making additional changes this week and in the future. These include:

• Limiting the number of student-list announcements that can be sent to 1 email per event. (each student list announcement goes to over 2500 accounts)


• Limiting student-all emails so that they may not include attachments


• Changing Barracuda so that it is 'tougher' on scoring SPAM email - this means that you will need to carefully watch your quarantine box for valid email once we implement this change and understand how it has affected campus.


• Making configuration changes on Lotus that will affect the replication services between the two servers.

We hope these changes will positively affect the system. We are asking that everyone watch how much email they are storing on the system, and cut-down on sending really large attachments to large groups of people. Remember, an attachment is multiplied by the number of people you are sending to. If you need a shared drive for project related materials, please let us know and we'll set it up for you.

We appreciate your cooperation with these changes. together, we can make our email environment better.