Dartmouth's e-mail network is one of the most used in the country, and several machines serve the one-half million messages sent over the system each week.
According to Manager of Special Projects Rich Brown, BlitzMail handles over 125,000 messages each business day.
With about 5,000 people using the system, this is about 25 messages per person each day. According to Computing Services, this number increases by 30 percent each year.
With so many messages, one may expect the system to lose or destroy messages unintentionally; however, Associate Director for Consulting and User Education Randy Spydell said that this is not the case. "User-error to computer-error problems are usually four-to-one," he said.
Computer Services employees can retrieve messages for students who accidentally delete important messages from their mailbox, Spydell said. He said they usually use the backups of messages on a daily basis to help people who have unintentionally lost some of their electronic messages.
The BlitzMail machines are backed up to magnetic tape every night between 3 and 4 a.m., which accounts for the BlitzMail shutdown during those hours. These tapes allow the restoration of the system in case of a serious failure.
Because several machines store BlitzMail accounts and not all the machines are backed up at the same time, some accounts go offline at different times than others during that early morning hour.
According to the Computing Service's web site, Dartmouth's BlitzMail system consists of one DEC Alpha machine running the Dartmouth Name Directory and six others to handle the mail and bulletins. The machines are named after Christmas reindeer, including Vixen, Donner, Dasher and Dancer.
The primary machine that handles incoming Internet mail is named Clause, and it distributes incoming mail to the accounts maintained on the other machines.
All messages are delivered almost instantaneously due to recent upgrades to the system. "We guarantee your mail will be delivered if you use the john.r.smith@dartmouth.edu format," Spydell said. He said it is rare that two students have exactly the same name, and problems often occur in mail delivery when people use account nicknames to send important messages.
There are approximately 15,000 accounts on the BlitzMail system, but not all of them are in use. In addition, Dartmouth now offers e-mail services to all alumni. To control the amount of accounts, Computing Services automatically removes employee accounts 30 days after an employee's departure and student accounts 60 days after the system discovers that a student will be gone for two terms in a row.
Spydell said one of the ways to ease the load on the system is to refrain from use blind carbon copies when sending e-mail. The system makes a copy of the message for each person when using this method, as opposed to other methods which simply make one copy of the message and mass-distribute it.
