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NAG, I'd like to discuss the upcoming mail upgrades and the possibility of more outages Something on the project page that has not been part of the other notifications is that the system will change over from FreeBSD to Suse Linux ((http://project.mail.msu.edu/timeline.html ). While this detail may not be of interest to users, it indicates to me that users may see a few bumps during the transition. I wanted to get a reaction to that from this group. First, this is not an attack. I like the mail system - the IMAP works great and you've ironed out the big proglems we had this summer. The proposed upgrades look great. Clearly you've got a good team here, and you must have 'compelling' reasons for changing the OS. I also welcome the willingness of the mail team to be open about these changes to the MSU community and for the team to be self-critical (see the mail.msu.edu Angel group). However, you have to admit we did have many frustrating problems this summer. Given that history, I'm a little worried that the change in OS will introduce new problems, the symptoms of which will not be detected in testing and only present once it goes into production. I'm considering warning those users I work with that the possibility of problems with email exists for a week or so after the 17th. Is this unreasonable? Paranoid? I'm not trying to be harsh on the mail team -just realistic. It was my impression that problems were due to hardware and not software this summer. But I'd like to know what campus sysadmins think, and I'd like to be braced if there is a consensus that problems are possible. For example, this summer I switched back to Pilot so I could get some email done while the problems with hardware were being ironed out & I'm prepared to suggest similar email forwarding measures for the few users I support if problems crop up (although not to pilot). I know that this may not even work given the MX record change. Pat Bills USDA IPM Center Entomology