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Campus E4E Faculty/Staff E-mail Service Upgraded

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In early May, the campus E4E server was upgraded from a Sun SPARCserver 5 to a Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 2 dual processor system. The new system has approximately 5 times the processing power of the old system. In addition, NACS made several other system software and configuration changes designed to improve efficiency.

Users who had been experiencing delays in mail delivery times and in accessing their mail noticed a big improvement from the upgrade. System statistics show that whereas the old CPU had troubles keeping up with the constant user load, the new one is virtually always caught up. NACS will monitor the status of the system and strive to keep processing power at the appropriate level as user demands increase.

Student E-mail Frequency of Use

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For those who use it, e-mail is such a regular and essential part of everyday communications that one wonders how one ever did without it and just how many others are using it regularly. The principal channel for undergraduate e-mail activities at UCI is NACS’ EA (Educational Access) system.

During the last week of Winter Quarter 1998, just over 13,000 different students used the EA system. Broken down on by academic unit (and excluding those units with only graduate programs) usage ranged between 82% (in the School of the Arts) and 92% (in Social Sciences) of total student enrollment. Across all academic units with undergraduate programs, the number of students accessing the EA system in the tenth week of Winter quarter represented 85% of total student enrollment.

Sending and Receiving E-Mail Attachments

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E-mail is a convenient tool for transmitting short, simple messages. Although some mail programs offer limited text formatting, the majority cannot send or receive messages that include italics, bold type, or underlining.

In order to address this limitation, most mail software, including Pine and Eudora (the two packages supported by NACS), allow users to send “attachments” with their e-mail messages. An attachment is any small file that accompanies an e-mail message. You might imagine an attachment as a document or picture which is enclosed in an envelope along with a cover letter. Upon receipt, the file is detached from the e-mail message, after which it can be opened by an appropriate software application, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or WordPerfect.

Unfortunately, mail attachments do not always work seamlessly, especially when files are transferred from one platform to another or between different versions of software. To help you use this technology to its best advantage, we have assembled the following guidelines:

  1. Use MIME to encode messages, not Binhex or UUencoding;
  2. Do not send more attachments greater than 70,000 total characters in size;
  3. Use 8 letter file names with a 3 letter extension to make your attachments legible by users of older DOS/Windows machines. Example: PAPER.DOC;
  4. Include separate attachments in multiple file formats (Word, WordPerfect, RTF) if you do not know what software your correspondent has available.

To read the reasoning behind these guidelines, and find out more about attachments, please see the following Web document:http://eee.uci.edu/doc/attachments

Delivering Your @UCI.EDU Electronic Mail

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UCI’s Mail Transport Agents (MTAs) are the computers responsible for delivering electronic mail addressed to your “@UCI.EDU” e-mail address which is published in the UCI Phone book and elsewhere. NACS currently provides 4 MTA machines that are constantly on-the-job. Each day the MTA systems route an average of 40,000 messages. These machines also process e-mail sent from certain on-campus mail gateways to other destinations on and off-campus.

The MTA systems use the e-mail delivery information (called the”delivery point”) contained in UCI’s online directory database (Ph/Qi) to know where to deliver electronic mail. To be sure your @UCI.EDU mail is being delivered to your preferred electronic address, use the online directory update form:

http://www.uci.edu/cgi-bin/phupdate

The field labeled “email” is the delivery point, which should be your local computer ID, an @ sign, and the name of the mail system from which you read and process your mail.