Mail server software upgrade

CNS will be installing a new release of our mail server software (Novell NetMail) on Friday, November 7th at 5:30 pm. We are currently running NetMail 3.1e and will upgrade to a newer release of the software.

We have had several conversations with software engineers at Novell about problems we've been having with NetMail 3.1e this semester. Novell's feeling is that we will benefit from moving to the newer release as certain problems (corrupt index files, file locking strategies) are handled in a much better manner than in previous versions of NetMail. Novell believes these problems have been causing most of the bad behavior we've been seeing from NetMail 3.1e this semester.

While we are updating NetMail, Drew e-mail services will be unavailable. We expect the update to take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

Those who use Mozilla Mail, Outlook Express or other imap clients will notice no differences after the update. Those who use Webaccess (http://webaccess.drew.edu) will notice some cosmetic differences in screen layout as well as some increased functionality for Rules and Calendaring, but most differences are relatively minor and the transition should be painless.

We appreciate your patience and hope the new version of NetMail will help us make progress toward providing better e-mail service.