noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Maintenance will be performed on the IMAP mail server starting from 4.30 PM this evening continuing through the weekend. During that time, all existing mailboxes will be migrated from an old storage system to a new storage system.

It is anticipated that you will be able to continue reading and sending e-mail while this maintenance occurs. As individual mailboxes are moved, there will be a brief period in which the owner of that specific mailbox will be unable to access it (everyone else will still have access to their mailboxes). However, as soon as the mailbox has been moved, access will be automatically restored -- at worst you may need to completely close your e-mail client and re-open it (you should do this if you suddenly find your client reporting that your mailbox cannot be accessed or if it appears to contain no messages).

Incoming messages received during the maintenance will be delivered as normal. There may be brief periods where they are queued for delivery a short time later.

There is one known caveat to this process. As soon as we start this migration, we will reintroduce the sent-mail problem seen earlier this week. From the time we start maintenance until your individual mailbox is migrated you may be unable to save sent-mail to the IMAP server. You can work around this by Bcc'ing yourself a copy of the message. It might be worth doing this for any important e-mail you send over the weekend.

This is the last step of the maintenance work started last week. It is critical that we complete it for the reasons explained previously.

In an effort to minimise the impact of this, we've given careful consideration to the order in which the migration will occur. We are going to try and prioritise the mailboxes that might be most impacted by this, so that they happen during the course of Friday night. For instance, if you normally read e-mail over a weekend your mailbox will likely be moved before people who don't. As a general rule, staff mailboxes will take priority over students, postgrads over undergrads, personal mailboxes before shared mailboxes, active accounts over expired accounts, etc. However there are a number of factors we're using to work out the exact order, and so it is extremely difficult to predict where a specific mailbox will appear in the list.

The algorithm we're using to do this almost certainly isn't perfect (and we apologise if we get your specific case wrong). However, it should be a lot better than simply migrating mailboxes on a purely alphabetic basis.

As noted previously, the safe option is to simply Bcc all outgoing mail to yourself for the entire duration of the maintenance work.

During the course of the weekend 4568 mailboxes were migrated, or just under half the 9747 that are scheduled for migration. Those mailboxes that have been migrated include pretty much all staff and postgraduate students; most undergraduate students are still to be migrated. The process will continue through the week and, at the current rate, should be completed during the course of Wednesday (although we expect things to slow down a bit as people start reading their mail).

For those people whose mailboxes have yet to be migrated, the problem with sent-mail remains. As noted previously, the safe solution is to simply Bcc yourself any important outgoing messages.

The current status of the migration can be seen at http://oldimap.ru.ac.za/status/. You can use this to find out if your mailbox has already been migrated or not.

We've discovered a problem with the configuration of the new IMAP storage back-end. As things currently stand, users will be unable to create new folders once they've migrated.

This problem should be easy to rectify, but this can only be done once the currently-running migration has completed. This is likely to take a day or two to finish.