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HEC Montréal: Follow-up on the Large-Scale Mail Installation

Apr 13, 2004  By Ludovic Marcotte
 in
How did HEC Montréal's new mail installation handle the spam and virus explosion of early 2004?
Conclusion

The new mail infrastructure helped HEC Montréal manage the e-mail worm crisis we all went through at the beginning of 2004. It also continues to efficiently limit the delivery of UBEs. According to the Call Center Team, "We have noticed an important decrease in calls regarding problems with the mail infrastructure, spams or viruses. This is especially true for computer viruses, as we are offering first level support if they get infected. On the other hand, some are actually calling to be sure we haven't blocked legitimate e-mail. Pushing forward the use of Spamity to users likely will help us in reducing the number of calls. Finally, some users also called to praise the speed, the stability and the efficiency of the new infrastructure."

I would like to give special thanks to Dominique Duc for helping me with the various charts in this article and Chris B. Vetter for reviewing the content.

Resources

Spamity

pflogsumm

Kaspersky Virus List

Ludovic Marcotte (ludovic@inverse.ca) holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from the University of Montréal. He currently is a software architect for Inverse Inc., an IT consulting company located in downtown Montréal.

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nice follow up by the way.i

Anonymous121's picture
Submitted by Anonymous121 (not verified) on Wed, 10/06/2010 - 02:30.

nice follow up by the way.i think that is good help for single mothers

HEC Montréal: Follow-up on the Large-Scale Mail Installation

wristbands's picture
Submitted by wristbands (not verified) on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 15:05.

Amazing stuff and I very much like the Table 2. Cost Worksheet.

Very detailed and neatly written.Thanks for sharing such a great article. wristbands

User Friendly

Kate Hendryx's picture
Submitted by Kate Hendryx (not verified) on Tue, 07/13/2010 - 21:16.

Now days email is so user friendly and easy to set up. You use to need an I.T. guy anytime you needed to integrate emails, or set up a brand new email system. Now pretty much everything is integrated making most websites, or html email accessible. Wordpress for example comes with automatic email installation. Just goes to show how far we've come with technology. fulfillment companies

IMAP usage

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 04/14/2004 - 02:00.

If their services are anything like ours, their graph of service utilization doesn't clearly represent the real use of their IMAP services. A POP3 user will typically poll the server regularly, causing a connection to be logged each and every time, where it's not uncommon for IMAP users to remain connected throughout the day, showing only one connection initated.

For IMAP utilization, it is usually more interesting to look at the number of concurrent POP and IMAP connections, as this often more closely reflects the real load on the server.

Of course, I could also be entirely wrong about how they're graphing their results.

Re: IMAP usage

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 04/14/2004 - 02:00.

I haven't looked closely at their stats. But they are using Squirrelmail to provide their webmail services. We do as well and have noticed that
it logs in a lot to do its job.

IMAPproxy

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 12/13/2005 - 05:16.

They're running IMAPproxy (which makes the webmail connections persistent) to counter that.

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