the mail.msu.edu project

On Wednesday, March 7th, 2007. mail.msu.edu implemented a new feature called greylisting. The primary purpose of greylisting is to reduce the amount of spam that comes into mail.msu.edu's mail servers. More information can be found in this TechBase article.

On Monday, February 21st, mail.msu.edu hardware & software updates were completed.

List of changes:

• An additional 1GB of RAM was added to the sys## boxes, which run IMAP, POP3, and HTTP services, as well as SMTP.


• The operating system on our MX (Mail eXchange) boxes was switched from Solaris to SuSE Linux. These machines handle the vast majority of the mail flow.

On Wednesday, December 20th, mail.msu.edu Netapp updates were performed. The OS on the Network Appliance FAS980 was upgraded to Data OnTap 7.0.5. The upgrade addressed bugs without any new features added.

On Thursday, August 24th, mail.msu.edu software updates were performed. List of changes:

• Spamassassin was updated to version 3.14 along with the custom rule sets we use from www.rulesemporium.com. These updates should increase our Spam detection rate.


• Clam AntiVirus was updated to version 0.88.4. This was just a security update, with no additional functionality added to ClamAV.


• The Courier IMAP server software was also updated to provide IMAP quota reporting. Using a client that supports this functionality lets a user view their quota usage without logging into webmail. Currently it's known that Mac's Mail App supports this functionality along with Thunderbird if this add-on is used: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/881/

On August 1 2006, mail.msu.edu will begin blocking e-mail originating from known spam sources. The system will rely on industry-recognized Domain Name System based databases of known spam sources, such as Spamhaus. A message originating from a listed host will be rejected and the sender will receive an explanatory notice directing them to http://help.msu.edu/mail. More information is available here.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please call the ACNS Help Desk at (517) 432-6200, or visit http://help.msu.edu

Academic Computing and Network Services (ACNS) launched mail.msu.edu in the spring of 2003 to replace the Pilot e-mail system. In the spring of 2004 - after migrating users to mail.msu.edu - the aging Pilot hardware was retired. Since that time, all e-mail addressed to "ID@pilot.msu.edu" has been automatically forwarded to "ID@msu.edu".

The time has come to retire Pilot e-mail addresses. As of May 11, 2006, all e-mail sent to an "@pilot.msu.edu" address will bounce, with a notice sent back to the sender indicating the mail is undeliverable. Finally, on August 11, 2006, the "pilot.msu.edu" name will be retired and any e-mail sent to "@pilot.msu.edu" will be rejected. The elimination of Pilot e-mail addresses should substantially reduce spam deliveries to MSU - with minimal impact on the delivery of legitimate mail.

In anticipation of this change, we encourage users to:

• check mailing list subscriptions
• inform key correspondents to stop using "@pilot.msu.edu" addresses
• insure that the "From" address they use in all e-mail client software is of the form "ID@msu.edu" (not "ID@pilot.msu.edu")

If you have any questions or need assistance, please call the ACNS Help Desk at (517) 432-6200, or visit http://help.msu.edu

This morning we updated ClamAV to version 0.88.1. This is a bug fix release. The notes are here.

The mail.msu.edu system experienced disk related difficulties yesterday afternoon. The removal of a snapshot (resultant of an aborted backup) caused the filer to start thrashing around noon. This was totally unexpected as snapshot removal is considered a non-intensive operation. The issue seemed to arise due to the fact that our disk usage has gone up drastically over the last week.

At 5:10PM we shutdown services completely and reallocated 400GB of disk to the maildirs partition. We then brought services back online, and verified that the filer was operating normally.

On Monday, February 20th, the project.mail.msu.edu/virus.php page about "Virus Scanning Info" was updated. The page now includes info that webmail messages are scanned for viruses and that ClamAV's online virus scanner is recommended instead of the locally hosted scanner on project.mail.msu.edu in the past.

Tuesday, February 7th, mail.msu.edu will be unavailable from 6:30AM - 7:00AM as upgrades are performed to the system's software. List of changes:

• Netapp Data OnTap OS Update to version 7.0.3


• Lowering of Spamassassin points for the following rules: RATWARE_OUTLOOK_NONAME set to .5 point, RATWARE_MS_HASH set to .5 point, MSGID_DOLLARS set to 1 point. The point changes affects messages composed on a PDA that are then sent through an Exchange server and being marked as SPAM. Hopefully this will alleviate this issue until its fixed in the next Spamassassin release.


• The Spamassassin score for RCVD_IN_SBL has been bumped to 4 points due to the effectivness of the Spamhaus block list that we're now mirroring locally. See www.spamhaus.org for more information.


• Our Exim configuration will be modified to now scan email for viruses in messages composed from one Webmail user to another.