6/27/2007

Problems with E-mail

Faculty, Staff and Students,

This is an explanation of some email problems the campus has experienced in the last two days.

We have two Security Gateway servers as part of our email system. These gateways run Symantec software to check inbound and outbound messages for viruses and spam. 97% of the mail that arrives at the gateway servers either has a virus or is identified as spam. These messages thankfully are dropped before they clutter our inboxes. At times a machine in someone’s office or dorm room on campus will have a virus and will attempt to send infected messages off campus. The gateway servers will generally trap these messages also and discard them before they go out.

Early Monday morning the control center for the Symantec software on the gateway servers stopped processing some inbound and outbound messages properly. The network/system administrators have been on the phone with Symantec tech support for hours during the past two days to try to resolve this problem. They reinstalled the Symantec software on the gateway servers earlier today and we think this will resolve the initial problem with the control center.

The initial problem appears to have caused a secondary problem. The college email address has been placed on a blacklist due to the system problems. These lists are maintained to identify organizations that send spam. Consequently, many outbound messages are possibly being rejected by organizations indicating that the sender is not authorized to send mail to that organization. The network/system administrators are working with the blacklisting company to resolve this issue, and it will be cleared up over the course of the next 24 hours.

As our network/system administrators worked to reinstall the Symantec application on the two gateway servers this morning, it was necessary to take each one offline in turn. Consequently some mail was being rejected when people from off campus tried to email us this morning. It their organization has a sophisticated email system it likely re-sent the message a little later. If they don’t have a sophisticated system it may have returned the mail to the sender as being rejected by us.

If you sent important email off campus in the past two days, please check with the recipient to determine if they received the message. If you were expecting an important message from off campus, please notify the sender that you have not received it.

Please accept our thanks for your patience and understanding as we work on solutions to these problems.

Sincerely,

Ron Heasley