Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

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The Life and Death of a UCInetID

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Many campus network and computer services are reserved for faculty, staff, and students, and your network identity (UCInetID) is the key to accessing them.

People who separate from the University are no longer eligible for some or all such services, and their UCInetIDs are subject to deletion.  It may be helpful to understand the policies for UCInetID deletion.

The UCInetIDs of faculty and staff who separate from the University become eligible for deletion when their records are removed from the campus payroll database.  In general, you will receive notification of pending deletion 60 days after removal from the payroll database, and the actual deletion will take place 30 days later.  Retirees may request to retain their UCInetID and certain services, such as email.  Faculty awarded emeritus status retain full UCInetID privileges.

Students lose email and services 1 year after they leave unless they graduate and apply for lifetime alumni services, although access to Registrar services continue for at least 2 years.

Most Spam is Blocked

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In 2008, UCI email readers were spared almost one billion spam messages which were blocked by the NACS spam-mitigation system prior to delivery.  This represents more than 21,000 messages for each faculty, staff, and student at UCI last year.

Of the messages accepted for delivery, 12 million were labeled as potentially spam so that people could quarantine them and inspect them at their convenience.  Here is a summary of the spam and mail delivery statistics for 2008:

Total Messages Blocked: 869,295,065
Total Messages Accepted: 97,484,167
Total Messages Accepted marked as spam: 11,786,134

The chart shows the number of spam messagess blocked each day in 2008 (in red) and the number of messages accepted for delivery (in blue.)  You can find more information on spam and spam filtering on line.

Higher Performance Email Service

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Email

Email

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.