One of the things that has happened around the university lately hasbeen a review of our campus-wide student email offering. You canprobably guess the result; pretty much everyone involved (especiallythe students) was very firmly in favour of moving to GMail or somecompetitor, provided that various side issues could be adequatelydealt with.

(Yes, some of these side issues are not trivial .But they are apparently significantly smaller than they used to be, andaddressable.)

There's a part of me that

Here's something important if you're designing or considering a newanti-spam system (as we may be at some point). It may sound obvious,but I think it's not:

If you run an email system, part of your job is filtering spam foryour users .

It used to be that you could provide your users a collection ofanti-spam options and tools and settings and so on, and consider yourwork done. Those days are over and gone. Much as with

Here is something that we have been forced to think about lately: areUPSes really a good insurance policy against power problems, or are theyinstead an extra source of problems? In short, does using UPSes reallyincrease your net reliability?

The problem with UPSes used by themselves is that they are another pieceof machinery to fail (and they are a moderately complicated piece ofmachinery at that). And UPSes do fail; for example, we recently hadan incident where a UPS reset itself out of the blue,