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THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES The University's Central Electronic Mail Service Management of Personal Mail Boxes on anumail 1. Introduction IT Services, through Network Services, maintains a University electronic mail service available to all members of staff and affiliates, and some postgraduate students. This service is supported by an electronic mail server known as anumail. This document states the policies and procedures used to manage deliberate or accidental longer-term storage of electronic mail in personal mailboxes on anumail. POP clients, (eg. Eudora, Netscape) allow users to set the frequency of checking for new electronic mail, and many users select very short intervals (ie. every 5, 10 or 15 minutes) which adversely impacts on the service. Users can also direct POP clients to "leave mail on the server". Not only does this result in an increase in disk space on anumail allocated to personal mail boxes, but the entire content of these personal mail boxes is loaded and unloaded each time that users check for new electronic mail. This places a further load on the server, and can degrade response to all users. Where users elect to read their electronic mail via leonard (the general purpose Unix service), they may be unaware that if they do not file their electronic mail in their home directory, then without the management strategy outlined below, it would remain in their mail box indefinitely. The policy and procedures below are designed to ensure that the service is managed effectively for the benefit of all users. 2. Policy 2.1 Management of personal mail boxes on anumail Each user is allocated a personal mail box to be used for the short term storage of electronic mail messages. There is no short term restriction on the number, or size, of messages stored in personal mail boxes. However, the total space occupied by personal mail boxes is controlled by the regular removal and archiving of older messages from all mailboxes. Electronic mail messages that have been removed and archived are recoverable for a period of one year after being archived. Personal mail boxes, and messages which have been archived, are password protected so that only the owner can read their contents. IT Services is bound by the University's privacy policy and respects the privacy of mail stored on anumail and its archive. 2.2 User Responsibilities anumail Personal mail boxes on anumail should only be used for the temporary storage of unread electronic mail, or for the short term storage of other electronic mail. For the long term storage of electronic mail, users should file messages in a "home directory" (Unix users), or on a local hard disk drive (eg. Mac and PC users). Users of POP client software are encouraged to not leave electronic mail on the server. Local IT Support Staff are requested to set up user machines with the option to "leave mail on the server" unchecked, ie off. Users are encouraged not to automatically check for mail more frequently than every 30 minutes, unless the user's duties require a shorter period. Local IT Support Staff are requested to set up user machines with the automated checking set at a period which is relevant to the duties of the user. 3. Implementation Procedure A process is run once per week to scan all personal mail boxes on anumail for messages older than six weeks. Messages older than six weeks are removed from personal mail boxes and archived. Users receive an electronic mail message identifying the first and last message of a batch of messages removed and archived from their mailbox. They are given instructions on how these messages can be restored using a simple WWW-based interface. A WWW-based procedure allows users to recover archived messages. The recovery process effectively reverses the removal process - ie. selected groups of messages are returned to personal mail boxes. Users are only able to restore all of the messages archived on a particular date, ie. they will not be able to selectively restore individual messages. Messages recovered in this way are not archived again from the mailbox until six weeks after the date of recovery. Information is provided to LITSS on the recommended defaults for setting up user electronic mail clients. Information is published on the IT Services web site advising users about management of their electronic mail, particularly: frequency of checking, not leaving mail on the server, and retrieving archived mail.   Authorised by: Dr Robin Erskine Director, Information Technology Services October 1999