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We have been in serious discussion about what practices are being used on state-mail.com. The site states that they do not store your password, and we've had people check their cookies locally and found nothing useful in them. However, knowing that they make use of PHPSESSIONS would lead me to believe that there could be session files laying around in the /tmp directory on the state-mail.com server holding information in plaintext. Otherwise, how could all of this magic work. Now, it is likely that those sessions get torn down and the information properly discarded (automatically, as it should). But yes, the potential exists for that server to get broken into leading to X, Y, and Z. The potential also exists that the sessions are done in memory, so there's less worry there. I don't see any huge problems with students wanting to use state-mail.com, but I think its being touted about as this great replacement when all it really is, is a web front-end to an IMAP client, plus a few little extra bells and whistles. Upon logging into state-mail.com, it creates 3 IMAP connections. Upon checking a message, it creates another 3 IMAP connections. And so on... I went ahead and ran some "infoporn" since I know all of you on NAG love that type of stuff. I've compiled a list of unique logins for the past month and they are as follows: For the month of November (thus far) there have been approximately 1081 completely and totally unique NetIDs logging-in via state-mail.com This is the breakdown of unique logins on a daily basis: Wed, Nov 28th 2007 - 239 (as of 10:22am) Tue, Nov 27th 2007 - 523 Mon, Nov 26th 2007 - 546 Sun, Nov 25th 2007 - 86 Sat, Nov 24th 2007 - 66 Fri, Nov 23rd 2007 - 57 Thu, Nov 22nd 2007 - 60 Wed, Nov 21st 2007 - 88 Tue, Nov 20th 2007 - 111 Mon, Nov 19th 2007 - 114 Sun, Nov 18th 2007 - 89 Sat, Nov 17th 2007 - 72 Fri, Nov 16th 2007 - 98 Thu, Nov 15th 2007 - 101 Wed, Nov 14th 2007 - 77 Tue, Nov 13th 2007 - 94 Mon, Nov 12th 2007 - 84 Sun, Nov 11th 2007 - 58 Sat, Nov 10th 2007 - 40 Fri, Nov 9th 2007 - 53 Thu, Nov 8th 2007 - 74 Wed, Nov 7th 2007 - 59 Tue, Nov 6th 2007 - 41 Mon, Nov 5th 2007 - 43 Sun, Nov 4th 2007 - 27 Sat, Nov 3rd 2007 - 17 Fri, Nov 2nd 2007 - 31 Thu, Nov 1st 2007 - 29 Wed, Oct 31st 2007 - 24 Tue, Oct 30th 2007 - 15 Mon, Oct 29th 2007 - 20 Sun, Oct 28th 2007 - 12 These numbers, at this point are manageable by both our servers and state-mail.com's server. But with all newer connections onto state-mail.com's server, it will be interesting to see how well it will hold-up. That's what everyone seems to be overlooking (well, everyone who is publishing these articles at the State News). Just some thoughts and info for now... ./brm