Syracuse University’s Orangemail experienced a cyber logjam over the past few weeks, leaving many users frustrated.

The technical problem affecting all e-mail sent to SU accounts was caused by an influx of spam that all e-mail servers have experienced in recent months. But after a weekend of upgrades, Computing and Media Services officials are confident that all future e-mails, including spam, will be delivered efficiently.

‘The way the mail server works is it ranks all incoming e-mails,’ explained CMS Project Manager June Quackenbush. ‘Short e-mails sent to one person get processed right away, but longer e-mails sent to many people are put aside until the server is less busy.’

Spammers have recently gotten good at sending short e-mails to one person at a time, thereby taking priority over group e-mails. The large amount of spam created a long backup of group e-mails, which is why students have been receiving e-mails out of order.

On Friday, CMS moved the mail server to another computer with 10 times the capability for handling larger volumes of e-mail. CMS officials predict that while e-mail will now be quicker, the amount of spam students will receive will increase.

‘While e-mail was backed up, we had a chance to look at incoming e-mail and pull out what we thought was spam,’ said CMS Communications Manager Deborah Nosky. ‘Now the e-mail is moving so quickly that we won’t have that chance.’

The Gardner Group, the university’s computer research corporation, predicts that by June, 50 percent of all e-mails received will be spam.

‘Last summer, we decided not to spend money on [spam protection],’ Nosky said. ‘But it looks like we will have to revisit that [this summer].’

Throughout the weekend, users were still experiencing some delays with their Orangemail accounts.

‘I still haven’t gotten some mail that I know people sent,’ said Amanda Ashley, a senior political science major. ‘If it’s something urgent, it’s taking time to get there.’

Nosky said that after the current e-mail backup clears, the newly upgraded system will be enough to handle future e-mails efficiently.

‘We don’t anticipate any more problems of this nature,’ Nosky said. ‘We have a high degree of confidence in the changes we made, and our initial testing goes along with that

Published on March 23, 2003 at 12:00 pm