What Won't Happen References Acknowledgments 1. The purpose of this paper is to brief committee members on a trial of SMTP-based email as an alternative to the proprietary Banyan Mail and QuickMail services which predeminate at present. ITS is conducting the trial in collaboration with IT staff across the University. The present paper makes no recommendations - any recommendations would be consequences of the trial. Access to, and use of, email is now close to universal amongst staff.
Many students use email and student demand for email services is increasing.
Existing proprietary email facilities for PC and Macintosh are severely strained by this very success. The number of people using mail, and the volume of messages, continues to increase and the infrastructure of mail servers and inter-system gateways does not scale well or provide the required robustness. At some future time, the newer IMAP protocol, which has similar functionality, may replace POP3, but the impact of that change would be minimal. Mail and directory service would be provided by a user account on a Unix or VMS host, rather than by registration on a Banyan or QuickMail server. In the short term, one effect would be to increase costs, including ITS workload.