[MLUG] Windows Live e-mail

[Phillip Kelchen <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I went and talked to MSA today about the e-mail situation and I was very 
surprised as almost all of them were against moving to the Windows Live 
system. I bet a lot of it had to do with the large amount of Macintosh users 
there (there were five PowerBooks out during that meeting and 3 Dells) but a 
lot of the representatives asked me, "What about Firefox? Will Webmail still 
suck on it?" So maybe we have a chance of keeping e-mail client access after 
all- let's cross our fingers. They vote on it after the summer, and it has to 
be approved by MSA to be implemented by IATS.

The thing that most surprised me was that there was one senator that was also 
working to defeat this proposal too. He told me what we needed to do to 
ensure this. 

1. Prove that most (or at least a sizable chunk) of the students would be 
adversely affected. 

This includes e-mail client users, people who use the address-book/calendar 
functionality in Exchange webmail, Mac users, Linux users, and 
Firefox/Opera/non-IE-browser users. Everybody else will likely not be 
negatively affected by the switch and would be for the migration.

2. Find out why the trash in the current Exchange webmail does not 
automatically empty. This could save disk space on the servers and allow 
slightly larger mailboxes for no extra money at all.

3. Find out what the current actual cost of running the e-mail servers for 
student use are and how much it would take to bump them up to about 1GB per 
account. 

An educated guess would say that for 30,000 accounts going from 30MB to 1GB 
would mean an increase of ~30TB in disk space on the servers. Nice 15K SCSI 
drives go for about $5/GB, so this 30,000GB would cost $150K, or $5 an 
account. That is assuming that no new servers or NAS boxes are needed, but I 
can't see the cost going up above $200,000 in total. I have no idea how much 
it costs to run the servers, but I imagine that the supposed ~30 mail servers 
don't cost more than an admin or two and a few thousand a year. 

4. Does this affect Bengal space?

I would assume not as I know that Bengal is just a Dell dual-Xeon (or single 
HT Xeon) box with a 36.7GB SCSI/SATA built-in and a 1TB and 127GB drive or 
array mounted via NFS. And there is about 220GB out of that ~1.2TB free 
still. (Thanks to ssh for that data!)

The first item is what we need to do and the next three we need to find out. 
If there are any IATS guys that know that information, please let me know. Or 
point me in the right direction.

Thanks,
Phillip 


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