Update April 23, 2008
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We anticipate a degradation in delivery times as of 4/25 with the 
expiration of the trial license to a product, unfortunately unaffordable, 
that we put in place as a stop gap measure.

We do have an affordable long-term solution in the works and it is 
currently pending approval and processing by UIUC.  We hope to have it in 
place before our main Proofpoint spam filter license expires in June.

In the interim, if you are depending on your Prairienet email for rapid 
and reliable receipt of time-sensitive or important information, we 
recommend that you use alternate means.

	
March 16, 2008

Subject: incoming emails lags and spam filters
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This is an update for all Prairienet members on issues affecting the 
timely delivery of incoming email.

You may have noticed that we have been experiencing intermittent delivery 
lags for incoming email. The lags can be anywhere from a few minutes to 
3-4 hours.

(Please note that Prairienet-hosted Web sites are on a separate system and 
are unaffected by this problem.)

Prairienet and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
(GSLIS), of which Prairienet is a part, rely on two Proofpoint 'spam 
appliances', i.e. dedicated servers that serve as spam filters.

Spam volume has been increasing at a phenomenal rate since we installed 
our first $10,000 Proofpoint server in May 2006.  Prairienet is being 
particularly hard-hit simply because 'prairienet.org' has been around for 
so long.  We are currently receiving over a million incoming messages a 
day, 98-99% of which are spam.

Our Proofpoint servers are routinely running at ten or more times their 
recommended loads trying to keep up.  Sometimes one or both will stall out 
and incoming email will be soft-bounced back to the sender.(1)  Once 
they're back up, they will work through the backlog.  As far as we can 
tell, to date no messages have been lost.

GSLIS technical staff are working on finding a permanent and affordable  
solution. This is a complex problem and spam load continues to increase.  
We currently have no estimate on when this problem will be resolved.

Until a permanent solution is found, your email delivery may be 
unpredictable and messages may arrive out of order.

If you are depending on your Prairienet email for rapid and reliable 
receipt of time-sensitive information, we recommend that you use alternate 
means.

Thanks for bearing with us.

If you have any questions, simply reply to this email.

(1) For the more technical among you, the bounce message will say 
"connection failed", "connection refused" or "connection actively 
refused".  Sending systems will generally make multiple attempts to resend 
such messages for up to three days.