Unix Systems Group

Your department or organization can now have their own blog@USF blog! Blog@USF provides your group with the latest web technologies and allows you to quickly and easily build a useful and informative website.

Features

• All of the features of a blog@USF blog
• Multiple blog users — all of your staff/members can post their own content
• Increased storage space — 300MB+

What can we do with a group blog?

• Post details on your department’s latest research
• Promote your group to the USF community and beyond
• Share pictures of your organization’s events
• Publish a RSS feed of the latest news from your group

• Much, much more!

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University administrators met this afternoon and are canceling classes and closing offices for Monday, Oct. 24 on all USF campuses. Essential offices and services are open. Please call your immediate supervisor if you have any questions. Go to http://www.pplant.usf.edu/hurricane/bulletin.htm for more information.

Email sent to AOL, Yahoo & Hotmail (and possibly other domains) is being delayed — in some cases messages are taking 2-3 days to be delivered. USF has been listed on a “blacklist” by these domains because of the volume of spam they have received from virus-infected PCs in the USF dorms. This only involved a few infected computers, but it has affected the entire university’s ability to deliver messages to those domains. Here are some things you can do to help prevent this in the future:

• Install a virus-scanner and keep it updated
  USF has a site-license for Mcafee Virus Scanner, which is available for all student, staff, and faculty at USF. details A virus-scanner is only as good as it’s latest update, so make sure that the auto-updates are happening every day
• Don’t forward your mail to an ISP that delays incoming mail (AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc)
  Some universities have taken the approach of banning the use of off-campus Email forwarding all together. We don’t want to punish everyone who forwards their mail off campus because of the handful of domains causing the problem. We also don’t want to prevent anyone from using one of these domains if they want to. However everyone who uses these services needs to know about the problems that are involved. A message will be sent out this week to everyone with a forwarding address in these domains letting them know about the problem.
• If you DO forward your mail to one these addresses, make sure it is the correct address!
  Compounding the problem of virus-infected PCs is the problem of “broken” forwarding accounts. Many of the forwarding addresses that are in use are not valid AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail accounts. This is normally happened because the account has gone unused and has been removed by the ISP or because the student entered their forwarding Email address incorrectly.

UPDATE: Just to clarify the situation, this isn’t a USF-specific problem. Many other universities and ISPs are reporting the same problems with AOL, Yahoo & Hotmail. As of 10/12, the delays have been eliminated by AOL and Hotmail, but Yahoo has continued to delay our messages.

The new WebMail system has been in production for two weeks and it seems to have made huge a difference in performance. Now that the performance problems seem to be in hand, how do you think we should improve WebMail?