Much goes on “behind-the-scenes” to ensure your e-mail is conveniently and properly delivered on and off campus. UCI’s “MTA” (Mail Transfer Agent) systems are a critical component of this, routing all mail sent to @UCI.EDU addresses.
In January 1996, the MTA systems delivered an average of nearly 23,000 message each day. In October 97, the daily average grew to 44,000 messages. Currently on average, the MTAs process and deliver a message every other second. A table of daily message averages over the last two years is included at the end of this article.
To provide sufficient capacity for the increasing e-mail load, NACS regularly reviews and upgrades the MTA systems. Currently, four Sun Microsystems SPARCstation servers handle UCI’s MTA needs.
1996 and 1997 Daily Message Averages
| Mail Received | Mail Recipients | Mail Sent | |
| 1/96-6/96 | 17,192 | 32,047 | 23,271 |
| 7/96/12/96 | 22,061 | 38,024 | 28,910 |
| 1/97-6/97 | 32,687 | 57,794 | 41,865 |
| 7/96-12/97 | 32,731 | 54,761 | 40,039 |
Mail Received – The number of messages sent to the MTAs
Mail Recipients – The total number of people that the mail was addressed to (some messages have multiple recipients)
Mail Sent – The number of messages actually sent by the MTAs (Mail sent to multiple recipients on the same host are sent as a single message)