1. E-mail Survey Results Aaron Brown Billy Kakes Calvin Ling Professor David Patterson

2. Selected Questions What is your supported environment? How many users?  Daily volume?  Amount of downtime they’ll accept?  Number of complaints? What tasks?  Diagnosis vs. repair?  Number of problems?

3. Interface Sample

4. First Trial: Response Sent to known admins and contacts 68 responses received  …mostly complete with useful answers  Only 21 “unsures” total Many responses from educational admins  Yet still lots from within industry

5. Results: Number of Users

6. Results: E-mail Volume

7. Results: Tasks Common TasksChallenging Tasks Configuration (56%) Upgrades/ Patches (12%) Tool Dev. (1%) Repairs (15%) Backup & Restore (3%) Monitor/ Test (10%) User Ed. (<1%) Other (3%) Filter Installation (37%) Platform Change/ Upgrade (26%) Tool Dev. (6%) Config. (13%) Other (6%) User Ed. (4%) Architecture Changes (7%) (151 total) (68 total)

8. Results: Acceptable Downtime

9. Results: Acceptable Downtime (2)

10. Results: Critical Affected User %

11. Results: Unique Problems

12. Results: User Requests

13. Results: Diagnosis vs. Repair

14. Results: Confidence Time

15. Results: Selected Comments High user expectations  “Users do not understand email; they expect it to be instantaneous, reliable, and single-hop.”  “Users have an intimate relationship with their email…when email is involved users get quite excitable.”  “Many of our users would be far less affected by losing their phone for a week than by losing email access for a day (or even hours).”

16. Results: Selected Comments (2) Spam is a tremendous headache  “Spam…is our largest problem. Our machines are well spec'd and very stable, until they are hit with too much email all at once!”  “I want to find the spammers and toss them off a 12 story building, then drive over them with a truck a few times.”  “Spammers should be charged for every piece of junk mail we have to accommodate in load planning, users assistance, and bounce tracing. I’d be able to buy Bill Gates at only $0.01 per junk message.” Viruses and worms, too

17. Results: Selected Comments (3) New technologies are useful  “Automation of all sorts has been improving performance and increasing reliability of our servers.”  “If you choose the right software, you don’t generally have any problems.”  “Email is old hat, actually.” …more are needed  “Testing correctness of configurations is one of the hardest things to do.”  “No matter how much work you do with it, you are never sure that it is secure and stable.”  “sendmail.cf is a bitch”

18. Conclusions Most sites had relatively few problems  E-mail is one of the most critical services Confidence time varies widely  Pretty similar curve to “number of users”, but correlation mostly absent  Hard to test configurations Better tools and practices are useful, more are needed  Worries over configuration, silent errors