Last Monday, emergency maintenance was performed on the student mail server. The load on this system, responsible for the electronic mail of all UT students, has increased dramatically over the last couple of months and has prevented the prompt delivery of some mail. In some cases, it took over four hours for a message to be processed. According to Igor Ybema, Systems and Network Manager at the Institute of Information Technology, Library and Education (ITBE), the system now appears capable of handling the load.
The problems started right after the summer holiday. `We still have not been able to pinpoint the exact cause. I think it is because of the increasing use of webmail, an application that makes it possible to read mail from anywhere using a web browser. Webmail leaves e-mail on the server and thus causes a higher load,' Ybema explains.
The increase of spam is also a factor. `Six months ago, the system had to process only a hundred messages per minute. Now that number has doubled.'
Students can do their part in relieving the server pressure, according to Ybema: `A lot of new students don't know that apart from using webmail, at home you can also use Outlook Express, for example. This program retrieves the mail from the server and stores it on your own PC. You can set the program to retrieve new mail every fifteen minutes. That way the load is minimal, and you still don't miss a single message.'
This seventh edition of the 4TU Career Special is a shared publication by the news editors of Cursor (Eindhoven University of Technology), Delta (Delft University of Technology), Resource (Wageningen University and Research), and U-Today (University of Twente). The magazine came into being in collaboration with industry, and is explicitly aimed towards students who are either in the final phase of their studies, or have just graduated.
