I don’t know if this has any bearing on the problem, but I use Outlook 2010 to connect to my @msu.edu mail account, via IMAP.  Since students have been back I get severe delays in Outlook’s ability to connect to the @msu.edu server, to the point where Outlook says it is “not responding”.  Eventually it will connect and update, but if such delays are happening across the board there could be some timeouts that are getting triggered that would prevent delivery?

These delays used to happen a lot to me, and they got worse as the day went on.  Then they stopped for a while and I got pretty good response times, but now I’m back to big delays whenever I select that account to check mail.  It does seem to correspond to the Academic calendar now that I stop to think about it.

I would think that could be fairly easy to track down if you provide the destination email addresses and timeframe to the mail group.

This week, I’ve had reports from faculty that some students in their class say they aren’t getting email from their professors at their email account of record @msu.edu .  In every case, the professor receives no bounce back messages from @msu.edu, but some, not all, of the students the email was sent to don’t receive it.   In two cases, I’ve been able to verify that the student does not currently have email forwarding on inside their MSU email account, but they are only receiving some, but not all email, sent to them by professors and other departments in the college.  I’m currently investigating five reports of this affecting over a dozen students.

Our email is all on the CampusAd/Exchange system now, so I was wondering if anyone else has seen an issue like this, or has heard complaints from students?   Could the recent changes in the anti-spam processing to alleviate bottlenecks be causing legitimate messages to be accidentally dropped with no bounce?  It seems to be happening primarily for messages sent to larger numbers, for example, all the students in a given class, or a subset of students interested in an upcoming Career Services event, etc.

Anyone else seen this kind of issue this week?

John Resotko

Assistant Director, Systems Administration and Support

Michigan State University College of Law

648 N. Shaw Lane, Room 208 Law Building

East Lansing, MI 48842-1300

email: [log in to unmask]

phone: 517-432-6836

fax: 517-432-6861

web: http://www.law.msu.edu/