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Enterprise Services

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NACS has made a number of changes to central services to better meet client needs.

Disk capacity for EA and E4E has been expanded. Users have two separate storage areas: one which provides temporary storage for incoming mail (“inbox”), and the other, with substantially greater capacity, is for long term storage of mail messages, attachments, and any other files (“home directory”).

Undergraduate students are allocated 3MB of inbox space and 8MB of home directory space. Graduate students are allocated 10MB of inbox space and 20MB of home directory space.

Staff and faculty are expected to keep their inbox usage to 10MB, but can continue to receive new mail until the inbox reaches 30MB. Inbox space is limited, and users are advised to download their incoming mail (for POP users) or to refile it to other folders (for IMAP users.) Users who compromise others’ ability to use e-mail by sustained use beyond the 10MB inbox limit are subject to losing the 30MB temporary storage privilege. NACS staff are available to assist users with inbox management.

Regular attention to one’s inbox is recommended, since the main campus e-mail server has been upgraded to allow attachments as large as 10MB. While this change was made as a service to faculty collaborating with off-campus colleagues, it does mean that even a 30MB inbox can fill quickly.

Staff are allocated 20MB of home directory space (but may use up to 50MB on a temporary basis), while academic senate faculty may use up to 100MB of home directory space. Users may review their disk usage and quota at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/ (click on “Quota Check” and authenticate with your UCInetID and password.)

Additional home directory space, if needed, is available for $5/month for each 100MB. Disk space in E4E is high-performance, fault-tolerant, and includes backup and security services. Users whose priority is economy are encouraged to purchase local disk for their desktops and keep their large files there.

Broadcast E-mail to Students

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With the support of the UCI Registrar, Network & Academic Computing Services provides a service to facilitate the distribution of academic information to large sets of UCI students. The “Student Electronic Broadcast System” (SEBS) provides mailing lists and delivery mechanisms to reach various categories of students.

With SEBS, authorized personnel can send e-mail to all students within a major, all students within a year (e.g. all sophomores), and several other useful categories. Lists are dynamically maintained using official UCI Registrar enrollment data so that schools and departments do not have to maintain and update their own lists.

The broadcast system was developed based on input from the campus, to meet academic information dissemination needs. More information can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/sebs/

SPAM: Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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As anyone who uses e-mail knows, “SPAM” is more than affordable protein and the subject of a Monty Python comic sketch. SPAM (or “Unsolicited Commercial E-mail”, UCE) is the electronic equivalent of paper junk mail, although some find it even more objectionable. To an individual, SPAM can be a petty annoyance or a plague, depending on how e-mail is accessed (via a fast network connection, or a slow modem). SPAM is a growing problem on today’s Internet, because its costs are borne by network providers and users rather than those generating it.

SPAMmers are always looking for well-connected systems that will accept their advertisements and relay them to points all over the Internet. This is done to conceal the identity of a SPAMmer, or to allow access to mail servers that have blocked transmissions from the SPAMmer’s own network. Several servers at UCI have been abused in this manner, causing throughput problems and downtime.

Through no fault of its users or operators, abuse by SPAMers can cause a mail host to be placed on an e-mail “blacklist.” Hosts that allow “e-mail relaying” (see the next article) are also blacklisted. E-mail from a blacklisted host is refused by some servers, which can prevent the exchange of important e-mail between Internet users.

SPAM is a tough problem for which there is no complete technical solution. Fortunately, there are several efforts underway to thwart SPAM on the Internet. If you would like more information, please see one of the Web references below:

Off-Site to Off-Site E-Mail Relay Disabled

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Due to the increased abuse of campus systems as SPAM relays by off-campus SPAMers, NACS has recently disabled “e-mail relaying” on EA, E4E, and Orion. This same change was previously made to the campus Mail Transport Agent (MTA) servers and most DCS-supported UNIX systems.

“E-mail relaying” is accepting e-mail from non-UCI hosts and retransmitting it to other non-UCI hosts. For example, a user at MIT sending mail to someone at the University of Texas using mail servers at UCI. This would happen if the MIT user’s mail software is configured to use UCI systems as its “SMTP” server, instead of using a MIT mail server for this function. The SMTP server is the one that distributes e-mail on your behalf, as contrasted with your POP server, which collects e-mail sent to you and makes it available for your access.

Turning off relay will not impact UCI e-mail users, as long as their software is configured to use the correct SMTP server. Problems sometime arise when people are off-campus and use a commercial ISP to access UCI e-mail. In this case, the ISP’s SMTP server should be used, not one at UCI, even if a UCI E-mail account is being used for receiving and processing mail. A UCI POP account can be utilized from an ISP in conjunction with the ISP’s SMTP server.