Computer program updated

by JIA HENG
reporter

Students who use the PINE electronic mail program may have received an announcement recently.

The HOBBIT computer system delivered messages to its users indicating PINE has been updated and is running.

"We made these changes to improve reliability and performance of our electronic mail services," Boag said.

HOBBIT now is a multiple machine cluster, according to Arnold Miller, executive director of computing services on campus.

One machine was used to process all outgoing mail and incoming mail in the past, he said.

Robert Boag, associate di-rector of systems administration for computing services, said the email system needed improvement.

"With the increased demand for electronic mail services, we began looking for ways to improve the performance of the services," Boag said.

"There are at present three machines in the HOBBIT cluster all sharing disk, print and other computing resources," he said.

"By using all three machines in the HOBBIT cluster, we were able to separate internet mail delivery from campus, [make] mail delivery more efficient and provide better services to our customers."

Miller said the change will divide the processing of mail between two machines. In-coming mail will be processed by one machine, while outgoing mail will be processed by another, he said.

In addition, the disk drive speed was improved by moving the mail system to a new disk drive.

"We also upgraded to the newest release of the mail server software on HOBBIT, which provided increased performance, fixed several small bugs from the previous release and added a few additional new features," Boag said.

Another improvement is the use of mailbox filters. They let individuals filter out un-wanted email messages based on who sent them or whether they contain specific words or phrases, Boag said.

"Thus, using a mailbox filter you can filter out some of the junk mail that you receive," Boag said.

Additional information on mailbox filters is available at http://www.marshall.edu/computing/mailbox_filters/ on the World Wide Web.