Meeting notes from March 19th dinner

On March 19th, 2003, some email domain experts met with some OSAF members while they were in SF for IETF.

Paul Hill (MIT), Bob Morgan (UW), Mark Crispin (CMU), Terry Gray (UW), Walter Wong, and Larry Greenfield (CMU) gave OSAF feedback. Mitch Kapor, Chao Lam, Lou Montulli, Aleks Totic, Pieter Hartsook, Jürgen Botz, and Ducky Sherwood represented OSAF.

Ducky's rememberance

I was most interested in how various universities handle the problem of "auxiliary email data" that users might have that isn't covered by the IMAP spec (in particular, address book and filtering).

• When an MIT user logs in, their home directory (on AFS) is mounted and accessible as if it is local. Thus, all the user information is centrally-stored, globally-accessible client-side data.
• CMU uses their homebrew IMSP. (CMU stopped development on IMSP on the theory that ACAP would be better stronger faster, but that hasn't happened.)
• I talked to Mark Crispin about UW, but he admitted not being the expert. It sounds like UW is pretty heavily pine-based (not surprising), so the question is somewhat moot.

I also asked about anti-spam and anti-virus strategies. I don't remember the exact details of who said what, but I do recall that filtering was strongly server-side, frequently with web interfaces for the filtering. CMU uses SIEVE with extensions. Viruses didn't seem to be a big problem--users have gotten pretty well trained by now to use AV.

I heard a little of a deep conversation between Aleks and Paul about security. MIT uses short-lived certificates for most (all?) of its security needs. (@@@ Aleks should do the talking here.)

CMU and UW were both open to being persuaded to enhance their IMAP servers to meet Chandler needs.

Lou was in the thick of the keepers of the IMAP servers. My interpretation of what I think I heard was that the IMAP keepers were amenable to the idea of us having one repository that can be accessed either via RAP or via IMAP. (Apparently it's relatively straightforward to pop in another repository to their IMAP servers.)

Note that RAP addresses a genuine problem -- that of where to put the "auxiliary email data". I didn't have the sense that any of the .edu people were particularly happy with the system they'd created; they seemed well aware of their limitations.

-- DuckySherwood - 19 Mar 2003

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Copied from CSG Twiki by -- PieterHartsook - 24 May 2004