Students, faculty and staff at Ohio State received an e-mail from Charles Morrow-Jones, director of the Office of Information Technology, Wednesday, about continuing problems with the OSU e-mail service. About 0.82 percent of e-mails sent to “@osu.edu” accounts were being lost.
The problem causing the lost e-mails was fixed at 4 a.m. on Sunday.
John Crawford, a senior systems manager for the Sociology Department was one of the first to notice and report the lost e-mails.
“I called up Charles Morrow-Jones and said I’m not getting all of my e-mail returns,” Crawford said.
Morrow-Jones uses an automated program to track e-mail delays in OSU’s system so he can see when it slows down. The program sends out e-mails and records how long it takes for them to get back.
Over winter break, OIT reported it was having denial of service attacks on its e-mail system. Users were assured that, while there were delays, no e-mails were lost.
Crawford noticed that even though the delays in service had been fixed, he was still losing e-mails.
“I was at home around Christmastime when I realized there was a problem,” Crawford said. Once OIT was aware of the e-mail losses, they found a solution in a short time.
“Over the weekend they figured out what the problem was,” Crawford said. He will be working with OIT staff to put monitoring programs, similar to his own, in place. The programs will monitor the e-mail system and help prevent e-mail loss from going undiagnosed for so long again.
The e-mail losses occurred between Dec. 22 and Jan. 19, and the problem was largely unknown until shortly before it was fixed.
