CIT bolsters university e-mail services through a series of improvements

By Beth Goelzer Lyons and Leslie Intemann

"Temporary inconvenience for permanent improvement," said Rick MacDonald, director of Cornell Information Technology's (CIT) Systems and Operations division. "That's what CIT's upgrade of the university e-mail system was for the entire Cornell community."

At the beginning of December, CIT began the final stages of upgrading the e-mail system to the most flexible, most secure system the university has ever had. The new hardware offers better performance and greater reliability and makes it possible to offer superior e-mail management tools to the community.

One service, PureMessage, blocks viruses from ever being delivered and tags spam messages so they're easy to spot and delete. Two improvements have just been made. One is that all mail originating at Cornell is now protected from being flagged as spam. Another is that PureMessage can more deftly detect viruses now that it is owned by Sophos, a leader in the anti-virus and anti-spam industry.

Two other services, WebMail and uPortal.Cornell's e-mail channel, let people access their e-mail from anywhere, using only a Web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. WebMail provides more features -- such as the new spellchecker -- and is easier to use than CIT's previous web-based mail client. People who already use uPortal.Cornell will find its e-mail channel a convenient way to quickly see their mail. It's also a nice substitute for people who enjoyed the simplicity and speed of CIT's old Travelers Mail.

For people who have their own computers, Eudora is still a good way to access mail. It offers all of the bells and whistles of a full-featured e-mail client and is an ideal way to store mail locally.

The security of the e-mail system is another big change. No longer can NetID passwords be sent without protection of some kind. To maximize security without impinging on people's ability to access their e-mail from anywhere, the e-mail system works with Kerberos (software installed on individual computers), CUWebLogin (a web-based tool), and TLS/SSL, a security tool built into almost every e-mail client there is, including Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Communicator.

"Although the original e-mail system seemed to work well for the general Cornell community, its hardware was too old and not powerful enough to adequately meet the demands of handling over a million e-mail messages a day," said Jim Howell, CIT's manager of messaging services. "It also couldn't handle the new services that the community wanted, especially a better way for people to get mail when they were traveling."

The new system is vastly superior. It's more responsive and significantly more robust. The new system did have some growing pains as the campus transitioned to it, with the most severe happening, unfortunately, at the start of the fall semester as hardware issues bumped against a worldwide e-mail virus epidemic that flooded the system with three times the normal amount of mail. This was followed by a series of software problems, resolved through configuration changes and a fix from PureMessage.

"It was disconcerting to see the numbers of staff working so hard -- as if they were playing Whack-a-Mole -- fixing one thing and immediately getting hit with another. It was disheartening to see the staff working day and night and just not getting that final result," said MacDonald.

Unfortunately, e-mail is complicated, and a small number of migration issues are still being worked out. But most problems -- mail delays, not being able to send mail, and postoffice failures -- now have been resolved. The new postoffices were reconfigured to make them 300 percent faster. WebMail suffered from its own success and outstripped CIT's wildest expectations. Its hardware is now two to three times faster and other changes have made it much healthier and more responsive.

"We put WebMail on new hardware and upgraded the software in mid-November," said Lee Brink, senior CIT consultant and WebMail manager. "With 8,000 unique users a month and 35,000 visits a day, it's performing well."

"The e-mail system as a whole is now stable and responsive and there have been no performance issues since the beginning of November," said MacDonald. "With the system stabilized, our people are starting to breathe again. We appreciate the patience and understanding of the campus through this much-needed change."