Phil Webb on E-Mail…

[#1]

Today, Phil Webb, Director (designate) of Network Services made the following post in our internal Announcements forum :

I have seen from the results of Dean's 1-2-1 that fixing e-mail is mentioned many times and number of people think that fixing e-mail is his responsibility, well it's not it's mine. I know how much ***** that e-mail has caused everyone across the business in the last 12 months, and thought it would be useful to let everyone know where it was, where we are right now and what is planned to improve it further. Where we were.... Around this time last year there was a sever lack of storage and the platform was running at capacity. So we bought some new storage which caused us months and months of grief. We'd also stopped managing the users on the platform so things we getting worse. Where we are now..... We've started managing the platform again by archiving mail older than 90 days old and archiving and black-holing mailboxes that have not been accessed for 180 days. We've also added around 1Tb of additional capacity to the netapps which means we've got headroom at the moment. What is coming to further improve things...... We have another 2Tb of storage ready to add to the netapps as soon as we have fully planned it. We are looking at options to increase the processing power of the netapps. We are about to start moving the remaining mail from the Sun storage. We are trialing various commercial spam detection solutions that have a 99.999% accuracy which comes in at around 1 false positive per 1,000,000 messages. We are going to complete the rollout of the new MX Cores which increases the capacity of mail we can process by around 70%. We are looking at implementing spam detection on the outbound relays to stop us being blacklisted so often. We are looking at the function of the MX lasts so that they have similar protection to the MX Cores. Scripts are being developed so that the CSC can do many of the things that require Net Ops at the moment and means there is less risk of error in future. There is development underway to change the default mailbox so that it does not receive messages unless they are directed to a known address The bottom line on all of this is that we've had a ***** time on mail, and we've significantly improved things so that it is not causing us all too much pain, but we still have many more things coming to further improve the reliability and functionality of the platform so that it causes us no pain at all and we have an e-mail platform we can be proud of. Phil