In order to work around GUMail’s minuscule 20 MB storage space, many Georgetown students have wisely switched to outside providers for their e-mailing needs. But last weekend’s virtual shut down of all NetID services proved that even forwarding messages to another account is not enough to ensure that you’ll be able to freely send and receive e-mails unimpeded. Although University Information Services admirably worked with Sun Microsystems to double the capacity of its directory services after a quarter of a million spam messages overloaded the system last Friday, UIS must continue to expand its capacity in order to preempt the next incident rather than scrambling to react to it.
“The hardware didn’t fail, the system was not mis-configured, and it responded as it was intended to respond but was simply unable to double its capacity as an uncontrolled volume of requests from outside the University crossed the threshold,” UIS Director Beth Ann Bergsmark wrote in an e-mail message.
“Increasing the capacity protects us for now, but UIS is keenly aware that every system, including your desktop, your servers, the network and the e-mail system is constantly under attack from what is brewing outside.”
The server overload was not UIS’ fault: spammers often target the University by sending thousands of e-mails to @georgetown.edu addresses, many of them fictional, and the directory must sort these messages, routing them to the correct mailboxes or filtering them out if they are clearly spam. UIS must be able to respond to and control these messages without shutting down the University’s entire system.
Although UIS is now allowing messages to be delivered to GUMail accounts, it continues to restrict messages from non-Georgetown addresses that are sent to more than 50 Georgetown recipients. Just a heads-up: if you’re a member of a large student organization, you might want to think twice before sending an e-mail about your next meeting, unless it’s from your school-sponsored account.
Fortunately, GUMail is back up and running—for now. UIS’ next task is to stop the next emergency before it starts, not after it’s too late.
