ECE E-mail Service - Message Delivery Delays (Apr 2014)

The ECE mail delivery queue has been reduced to serviceable levels as of 12pm, April 2nd, 2014. Mail should be arriving to your ECE mail Inbox as expected.

This morning, ECE’s mail service experienced a demand overload, with a peak of approximately 3,000 queued messages as of 10am. Many users experienced significant delays when sending and receiving e-mail. The IT Team identified two likely triggers of this mail service disruption:

1) A series of well-formed spam messages, not filtered by either UBC IT or ECE’s spam filters, were addressed to an ECE mail account which forwards to multiple recipients. This forwarding dramatically multiplied the number of messages in the mail queue.

2) An ECE network issue causing packet loss was identified that may have contributed to poor mail server performance

The IT Team enacted changes to manage message volume, and the mail delivery queue was reduced to tolerable levels as of 12pm, April 2nd. Mail will now arrive to your ECE mail inbox as expected, with some messages arriving several hours late.

Unfortunately, many of the recipient addresses noted in 1), above, are Gmail-based. Google has temporarily blocked messages originating from the ECE mail server. This block will be removed when Google determines the ECE mail server to be safe. The IT Team has no resolution timeline from Google, but this has occurred in the past and is normally resolved within 24-hours.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the IT Support Team in MacLeod 105. With the mail service functioning normally again, you may also send your query to help@ece.ubc.ca

Thank you for your attention,

IT Support Team at ECE