Mail will be up and down today. I will attempt to post here when we have those oustages. One is forthcoming now… expect mail to be down from 11:15 until 11:45 (up sooner if possible).
Question: Why are we having a mail outage? Answer: 20% of the problem is old hardware. 80% of the problem is that Mail Inbox sizes are out of control.
What can you do to help?
Move mail out of your inbox into another folder. Depending on how your mail client is configured, this may mean it moves to your home directory on CHEMISTRY or to your local machine. Either would help our mail services tremendously.
What we are we doing in support?
- We’ve expanded the mail disk a little bit (it was at 99% full). This is a temporary solution- we’re all out of room.
- I will be contacting users who have a very large Inbox. This means anything larger than 50MB. Now, some users have hundreds and hundreds of MB in their Inbox- how you manage your mail is your business. However, if you don’t categorize or organize your mail into subfolders please consider simply moving mail out of your inbox into another folder to decrease load on the server. Maintaining a massive Inbox is wrecking mail for everyone and making it tremendously difficult for us to do our work.
- Among the$60,000 in hardware we just bought was a mail server. We’re working on that. These things take time. Keeping a tidy Inbox on your end will help move this project along as it simplifies (somewhat) rolling it out and it creates fewer emergencies for us to solve- like this current outage.
Thanks.