Wed 19 Apr 2006
We had a hardware failure on mail.usf.edu — just a single drive failure, nothing catastrophic, no data was lost and there wasn’t any downtime. However, while the drive array is repairing itself, the system will be slow and you may even get an error logging into WebMail. I’ll post an update once the repair process is complete. I expect it to finish some time this evening.
UPDATE: The rebuild completed at 3AM. It took longer than I expected due to the amount of data that was in use by the mail server. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
April 19th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Dear Eric,
I have been having terrible problems with my mail for months now. I use a Mac and I have been using the Apple mail program which allows me to receive mail in both my mail accounts. At least it did at one time. Now I can not seem to receive mail from usf in that program nor can I send mail from either of my accounts in that program.
I absolutely hate webmail. It is slow, non-intuitive, a bit stupid and not at all friendly.
Is there a way for me to continue to use my Apple mail program?
This is very frustrating.
Also, when I send mail (from webmail or from Apple mail, I do not have a record of the mail sent). This is an impossible situation. I need records of the mail I send.
Now that I’m on a roll, I am also missing all of my archived mail in folders. Following your directions, I have no folders on the right-hand side of subscribe/unsubscribe. I only have folders on the left-hand side with an “unsuscribe” below them.
Can you suggest a way for me to recover the information in my folders?
Thank you,
Joani Spadaro
Director, Program in Graphic Design
April 19th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
I wrote an explanation on how to use Mail.App with mail.usf.edu accounts and then realized that your account is with USF/St. Pete. We only provide WebMail access for St. Pete accounts, we don’t have any access to the actual mail servers. WebMail is basically just a mail client like Outlook or Mail.App, it connects to the actual mail server using the IMAP protocol and displays your new mail. Most of the problems you are having are with the mail server itself — bayflash.stpt.usf.edu in this case. You’ll need to talk to St. Pete’s Help Desk to have them check out your problem.
WebMail does have it’s faults — it’s not very pretty and it takes some getting use to, but it is the most feature-rich Web-based email I’ve seen, so I think we’re going to stick with it for awhile. I’m also planning to do some updates on the interface to make it look a little better this summer.
#
I’m including the instructions I started writing about Mail.App. I’m sorry that this isn’t going to help you, but someone else might find it useful.
Mail.app will work just fine with your USF mail account — in fact, that is the client that I use most of the time. The settings you should use are:
Account Type: IMAP
Incoming Mail Server: mail.usf.edu
Username: Your USF NetID
Password: Your USF NetID Password
Your Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) Settings should be set to:
Server Port: 587
Check the “Use SSL” box
Authentication: Password
Username: Your NetiD@mail.usf.edu
Password: Your USF NetID Password
April 19th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
To whom it may concern,
I haven’t had the time to read through previous postings to see what the problem is. I am a graduating senior from the College of Business Administration majoring in M.I.S. The past 4-5 months or so there have been all kinds of problems with the USF webmail system. I’m not sure if upgrading the system was worth it or not becuase there are constant problems with it. It has truly become an inconvience knowing that the USF webmail system is not reliable at all. It is getting closer to finals and the end of the year, a time when a reliabale system is needed most. I am graduating in 2 1/2 weeks so the email system will soon no longer effect me, but I was just wondering what truly is going on with the mail system?
April 19th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
I cant send out any mail. Why and What should I do?
April 19th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Abrom:
This particular problem is unavoidable. Hardware failures happen and rebuilding a RAID array takes time.
The performance problems we have seen this semester however, are because of a lack of resources. We receive over a half million messages per day, which the mail server itself can handle easily, but the increased demands of spam and virus scanning require more CPU power. We are working on a solution, and hopefully we will have one soon, but for now we are getting along with the hardware that is available to us.
Kimberly:
Try to send a message now. Since each connection is taking longer because of the array rebuild, there are more open connections than usual. All of those open connections were filling up the connection queue and not allowing new connections. I’ve raised the limit now, so you should be able to send out.
-Eric
April 19th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Im guessing this failure affects rha.usf.edu also?
April 19th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
Query: LOGOUT
this is the message i got when i tried to send an email. what should I do?
September 7th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
ERROR:
ERROR: Could not complete request.
Query: SELECT “INBOX-recover”
Reason Given: mailbox does not exist
says mailbox is full even though I have no mail in the inbox or sent mail folder.. Please help