During the last academic year, NACS made a number of enhancements to the central campus email service.
The most important changes were implemented to improve performance and responsiveness of the email system, including the Webmail interface.
One of those changes was the format in which email was stored (the “mix mailbox format” from the University of Washington) which allows much faster response with large inboxes. The email servers are connected to disk storage in a new way, improving access speeds. We’ve also installed new versions of the email server software (the program that supports POP and IMAP), which includes features that improve server performance.
Other enhancements include:
Disk quotas have been expanded to 1Gb for faculty and 500Mb for staff, and larger quotas are on the horizon.
The maximum size of an email message has been expanded from 20 million to 30 million bytes. Practically, this means you can send larger attachments in a message. However, large attachments affect email server performance, and may not be acceptable at the destination server. Therefore, it is prudent to be aware of your attachment size, and you should consider alternatives for file sharing such as sending a link to your document.
In addition to these visible changes, NACS maintains email performance in other ways, such as applying security patches, and refining the rules that identify spam.