E-mail Survey Results

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E-mail Survey Results
Aaron Brown Billy Kakes Calvin Ling Professor
David Patterson
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Selected Questions

• What is your supported environment?
• How many users?
• Daily volume?
• Amount of downtime theyll accept?
• Number of complaints?
• What tasks?
• Diagnosis vs. repair?
• Number of problems?

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Interface Sample
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First Trial Response

• Sent to known admins and contacts
• 68 responses received
• mostly complete with useful answers
• Only 21 unsures total
• Many responses from educational admins
• Yet still lots from within industry

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Results Number of Users
6
Results E-mail Volume
7
Results Tasks
Common Tasks
Challenging Tasks
(68 total)
(151 total)
User Ed. (4)
User Ed. (lt1)
Other(3)
Other (6)
Monitor/Test (10)
Upgrades/Patches (12)
ArchitectureChanges (7)
PlatformChange/Upgrade(26)
Backup Restore (3)
Repairs(15)
FilterInstallation(37)
Configuration(56)
Config. (13)
Tool Dev.(1)
Tool Dev. (6)
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Results Acceptable Downtime
9
Results Acceptable Downtime (2)
10
Results Critical Affected User
11
Results Unique Problems
12
Results User Requests
13
Results Diagnosis vs. Repair
14
Results Confidence Time
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Results Selected Comments

• High user expectations
• Users do not understand email they expect it to
  be instantaneous, reliable, and single-hop.
• Users have an intimate relationship with their
  emailwhen email is involved users get quite
  excitable.
• Many of our users would be far less affected by
  losing their phone for a week than by losing
  email access for a day (or even hours).

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Results Selected Comments (2)

• Spam is a tremendous headache
• Spamis our largest problem. Our machines are
  well spec'd and very stable, until they are hit
  with too much email all at once!
• I want to find the spammers and toss them off a
  12 story building, then drive over them with a
  truck a few times.
• Spammers should be charged for every piece of
  junk mail we have to accommodate in load
  planning, users assistance, and bounce tracing.
  Id be able to buy Bill Gates at only 0.01 per
  junk message.
• Viruses and worms, too

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Results Selected Comments (3)

• New technologies are useful
• Automation of all sorts has been improving
  performance and increasing reliability of our
  servers.
• If you choose the right software, you dont
  generally have any problems.
• Email is old hat, actually.
• more are needed
• Testing correctness of configurations is one of
  the hardest things to do.
• No matter how much work you do with it, you are
  never sure that it is secure and stable.
• sendmail.cf is a bitch

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Conclusions

• Most sites had relatively few problems
• E-mail is one of the most critical services
• Confidence time varies widely
• Pretty similar curve to number of users, but
  correlation mostly absent
• Hard to test configurations
• Better tools and practices are useful, more are
  needed
• Worries over configuration, silent errors