On Sept. 5, the Office of Information Technology Helpdesk sent an e-mail to students acknowledging that students may not have received their e-mails because it had been quarantined by the Postini Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam service. 

Student e-mails were not supposed to be processed by Postini, and this mix-up was a result of the switch to Gmail that the University made over the summer, according to Harry Nicholos, assistant director for systems and hosted services.

Nicholos said the University was notified that there was an issue by a student.

“We’d gotten a remedy call.  It said very precisely … that this student didn’t get something,” Nicholos said.

When the University looked into why this student did not receive their e-mail, they discovered that the settings in Postini were not what they should have been, according to Nicholos.

Postini is a program that scans e-mail for spam and viruses, Nicholos said.  Generally, it scans e-mails; then, it quarantines suspect mail in a separate account.  Users receive e-mails that notify them about the e-mails in their quarantine.   

“This tool [Postini] has a quarantine. For the students, that is not supposed to happen,” Nicholos said.

When the University switched to having Google student e-mail accounts, it intended to have the scan and quarantine features turned off.  They were not turned off, but the notifications were turned off.

Nicholos explained that finding the extent of the quarantine is complicated because of the complicated program.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to tell what students were affected, because we couldn’t ask Postini who was affected.  There is no mechanism that we can make that query,” Nicholos said.  “We’re not quite sure who was set for quarantine and who wasn’t.”

Nicholos explained that due to the size of the student body, it was impractical to individually determine which individuals were affected.  They acted as though all student accounts were having spam quarantined.

 ”We programmatically went through and reset all our student accounts, so that they fly right through Postini, as if Postini wasn’t there, which was what should have happened to begin with,” Nicholos said.

Nicholos is confident that the e-mail system is now running correctly.

“We’ve checked and made sure that mail flows correctly for students,” Nicholos said.

Erin Lindauer, a freshman in materials science and engineering, said she lost several e-mails in the accidental quarantine.

“They had quarantined three, and I just pulled them out and put them in my inbox,” Lindauer said.  “They were three important e-mails, one of them I missed the date for something.”

James Blew, a freshman in chemistry, said his quarantined e-mails weren’t important but if they were it could have been a different story.

“[My quarantined e-mails] weren’t really important, but fairly important.  But, if you’d been interested in it, it could have been a problem,” Blew said.

Blew said he was not upset by the quarantined mail.

“Crap happens, it’s getting fixed, nothing important [of mine] was blocked,” Blew said.

Nicholos explained that they regret the mix up and have remedied the problem.

“As soon as we found out, we fixed the user [accounts] and fixed our code so that won’t happen again,” Nicholos said.  “We’re sorry for the inconvenience.  We work hard to deliver a quality e-mail service.  We really feel bad that we missed this.”