Correspondence with Faculty IT Committee and Brice Bible regarding email concerns including correspondence with Professor Baker regarding Library Faculty concerns - January 2007 - Lou Gross --------------------------------------------------------------------- mbreinig@utk.edu,bbible@utk.edu Email problems Marianne and Brice, I have been getting more and more frustrated faculty complain to me about email issues. This is definitely affecting productivity and has reached a stage that something needs to change from my perspective. Emails from the Provost and Chancellor haven't even gotten to me over the past few days and the staff in those offices have been complaining that they are now having to Fax documents that they had been sending by email because there is no timely receipt. One faculty member informed me that he finally received an email 7 days after it had been sent. A very competent server administrator here told me that he now uses yahoo mail to try to avoid some problems with UT mail servers (but it is still slow if it goes through a UT server). We have discussed email problems for many months now. I have requested that the issue be placed on the agenda for the University Faculty Council meeting on Monday with President Petersen. The current situation is not appropriate and this is with only a fraction of the people transitioned to T-mail who eventually will be. Perhaps there are some plans to deal with this, but I have heard too many complaints to continue to simply reply that this is being worked on. Cheers, Lou 1/5/07 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: RE: Email problems Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 20:07:16 -0500 From: "Bible, Brice (Brice)" To: "Lou Gross" , Lou, I understand your frustration and have heard many of the same complaints. Would you have some time to talk before your meeting on Monday? I could update you on what I know. Brice -------------------------------------------------------------------- Brice, Thanks for the response. The University Faculty Council meets with President Petersen starting at noon. I should be in my office by 9:30 or so if you have time to talk (4-4295). The real question is how to proceed from here, and I'd appreciate your comments on this. I am afraid, given the lack of progress, the UTK faculty at least are hesitant to have any confidence that any fix along the lines of announced plans will actually work. Cheers, Lou cc Marianne 1/7/07 --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Baker, D Gayle Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 8:55 AM To: Brian J Edwards (bedward1@utk.edu); Brice Bible (bbible@utk.edu); Bruce W Bomar (bbomar@tennessee.edu); Don A Leatherman (dleathe1@utk.edu); James L Fitzgerald (jfitzge1@utk.edu); JoAnne Deeken (jdeeken@utk.edu); Law I Schuelke (laws@utk.edu); Linda A Frank (lfrank@utk.edu); Marianne Breinig (mbreinig@utk.edu); Vasilios Alexiades (alexiades@utk.edu) Cc: Baker, D Gayle Subject: Dear Members of the Faculty Senate IT Committee: In May 2006, the UT Libraries converted from our library-managed email system to the OIT-managed system, Tmail/MS Exchange. Since then we have experienced a large number of service problems with Tmail and SMTP. At the December 12, 2006 meeting of the UT Library Faculty, I brought up for discussion the email system. I reviewed a list of several dates, gleaned from oit.utk.edu, specifically found in "News and Current Events" and the OIT Events Listserv: - May 21: partial Exchange System outage - June 1: Exchange (Tmail) system performance degradation - June 2-3: Exchange outage - August 2: Exchange outage - August 11-13: Exchange outage - October 10-11: Exchange / SMTP problem - October 16: SMTP delays - November 14: Email delivery delays - Dec. 6-8: Exchange problem Another problem with SMTP occurred over the break on December 28, 2006 and was identified on January 2, 2007. Below is the email that was sent to the OIT Events listserv about the problem: From: OIT Event Notification [OITEVENTS@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] on behalf of Ashley Jarrell [ajarrell@utk.edu] Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 1:55 PM To: OITEVENTS@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU Subject: [OITEVENTS] Email Hi All, OIT experienced a problem with one of the SMTP servers over the break. The problem was discovered this morning and the device has been removed from service for repair. Users might have noticed problems receiving emails from outside of Exchange. As a result, there is quite a bit of email queued up to be delivered and there is a chance that some emails sent while the server was misbehaving will be lost. Thanks, Ashley Ashley Jarrell University of Tennessee Office of Information Technology Customer Technology Support Manager, Technology Consulting & Support (865) 974-2650 (PH) (865) 974-4649 (FAX) Library faculty members discussed their frustrations with the recurring problems with email. Given the track record with Tmail and SMTP problems since last May, the faculty expressed concerns about the likelihood of more problems, especially when new accounts are added in large numbers to Tmail. The faculty agreed that I would contact you and your Faculty Senate IT Committee about our experiences and ask for an investigation into these problems. I look forward to being able to discuss this with you further. Best regards, Gayle Baker Gayle Baker Professor & Electronic Services Coordinator University of Tennessee Libraries 1015 Volunteer Blvd. Knoxville, TN 37996-1000 865.974.3519 (voice) 865.975-0551 (fax) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Gayle and members of the Faculty Senate IT Committee, First, thanks to Professor Baker for her efforts to concisely summarize some of the problems and for taking the leadership role in discussing this with the Library faculty. Second, I have done everything I can think of to make it clear to relevant administrators that the email problems simply cannot be allowed to continue. I have discussed the matter with the Provost, Chancellor, Chief Information Officer and President. The President stated yesterday in the University Faculty Council meeting when I raised the issue that although this transition was a System-level decision, it now falls to the campus to deal with, and that he had transfered the relevant OIT staff to the campus to do this. In a conversation this morning with the Chancellor, it is not clear that the latter action has yet occured. The Chancellor promised that he would make an announcement as soon as feasible regarding actions he will take to deal with the problem. I encouraged him to seek faculty expertise in the process of deciding how to proceed. If any of you have specific suggestions of individuals on-campus who have the appropriate technical expertise to contribute input to the Chancellor on how to proceed, please send me their names so I can pass them on to the Chancellor. I have already suggested Jesse Poore and Doug Birdwell as two appropriate faculty to consult. As an addendum, you may be interested to know that one of my staff members received an automated email about Tmail today which stated among other things " According to our records, you have a new Tmail account but you are routing your email to another email account. You may be missing out on some important emails by not using your Tmail account. The new email system handles email a little differently. While you may be receiving some University communication, you may not be receiving ALL University communications." I find it rather amazing that both the mail system is set up so that it does not reroute ALL mail and that we are still encouraging people to use Tmail when the transition has been effectively halted due to problems! Cheers, Lou 1/9/07