End-of-life system creates quirks and cost in campus e-mail

by Melody Gustafson
KENT – According to Tom Beitl, executive director of information systems in infrastructure and operations at Kent State University, several hundred thousand e-mails are sent out each day.

They are first sent through the server and the majority of them are delivered properly. The increasingly common instances of late, missing, or improperly screened messages may be due to a myriad of causes. However, Beitl pointed out that there are lots of possible quirks and wrinkles in the system.

Creative solicitors are driven by the dollar to find new ways to get their messages to potential customers. This makes the task of filtering the unwanted mail without affecting any of the legitimate mail complicated. “It’s hard to work that balance,” said Beitl.

If the machine identifies a message as spam, it filters it as such, but the server must be updated regularly with the latest filtering guidelines. The university has experienced some difficulty with updates recently, but it has begun the process of looking into a plan to either refurbish the equipment or even replace it, according to Beitl.

A company called Mail Frontier sold the equipment to KSU about three years ago. Since then, another company, Sonic Wall, has purchased Mail Frontier. The university is already looking at new hardware, but it is also trying to upgrade the existing equipment. “In this day and age, three years is basically end-of-life,” Beitl said.

KSU hopes to improve the situation soon, although it is hard-pressed by the enormous cost. “We want to offer the best support and products we can to students,” Beitl said.