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GUMail: Recent Problems and Solutionsback to GUMail: Index to Online Support Resources
Solutions to the Recent Problems at Georgetown
What is Happening? In 2005, the stability of the GUMail system was critically affected by several environmental factors. These factors include a significant change in traffic and volume due to SPAM and virus activity, a decrease in the reliability of delivering e-mail messages to external providers, and a lack of processing power to accomodate the amount of e-mail traffic that we carry each day. GUMail users have experienced unscheduled outages and delays in the delivery of their messages. SPAM Spammers often target large e-mail providers, such as universities, governments, and commercial domains. They tend to use programs that generate or guess e-mail addresses, or use robots to harvest e-mail addresses from web sites and other sources. After harvesting or guessing these e-mail addresses, they send bulk messages to the entire e-mail community. Virus Activity E-mail viruses create additional traffic problems. These viruses install software on your computer that sends thousands of infected messages to anyone in your e-mail address book. They collect e-mail addresses from your computer to send more messages. Hackers and spammers continually modify their techniques to evade detection. While the potential for virus infection is usually limited to the users of Microsoft products, the outcome of the infection will affect all of the e-mail users. Delayed Routing and Refused Delivery Georgetown has seen periodic slowness in delivery of messages to external e-mail hosts and providers, such as AOL, Yahoo!, HotMail, MSN, and GMail. This has affected GUMail users who forward thier email to an external provider. When external e-mail providers won't accept incoming messages, the system queues the forwarded messages for delivery at a later time. Georgetown will continue to try and deliver the message at periodic intervals for one week. After that, delivery is considered to have failed and we return the message to the sender with a notice that delivery was unsuccessful. Click here for an example of a delayed routing warning message. If you are expecting e-mail messages, but your provider is refusing delivery, there is nothing that Georgetown can do to make you aware of your account status. GU will send a notification to the sender that delivery has failed, but the intended recipient will not be contacted. Lack of Processing Power GUMail was originally developed to manage approximately 20,000 accounts. When Georgetown decided to offer e-mail addresses for life to our Alumni, the GUMail customer base incresed significantly. We are continually upgrading our system to meet the ever increasing demands of a larger customer base. The solution for increased usage is to add more hardware and processing power as funds are available. However, outages must be planned and upgrades must be made during "off hours". If the GUMail service is unavailable, you may still be able to access and read your existing e-mail messages; but you will not see new messages until the problem is resolved. Solutions in Response to the Problems at Georgetown Hardware Upgrades In April 2005, UIS installed additional processing power and hardware to the university's e-mail delivery services. This has reduced the problems we have had with managing the large volume of e-mail traffic. UIS is continually investigating and fine tuning our e-mail system to optimize performance while maintaining stability and reliability. Spam Filtering Georgetown subscribes to a commercial Spam service called SpamHaus. SpamHaus identifies the most egregious spammers and blocks traffic from these sources. SpamHaus also identifies infected computers and blocks e-mail traffic that is sent from the infected computers. Scheduled Broadcast Messages UIS and the Alumni Association have agreed to limit large scale e-mail broadcast messages to entire communities during peak hours. This will reduce e-mail traffic during peak hours and speed up normal delivery times. Authenticated Sending of E-mail Messages Outgoing messages are sent using an authenticated SMTP e-mail protocol, which requires you to enter your NetID and password to authenticate before sending the message. Authenticated sending of e-mail messages reduces Spam. E-mail Attachment Filtering Service In August 2004, the SoBig virus crippled e-mail systems across the country by generating millions of large, virus-infected messages with malicious attachments. Georgetown University was able to keep the GUMail system running by installing a filter that blocked the delivery of e-mails with attachments that matched the SoBig virus profile.
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