Technology glitches in Blackboard and Google e-mail peaked after an ice storm spurred the need for increased university communication. Students experienced delayed e-mails and Blackboard outages. University officials said the problems should end now that campus-wide alerts are no longer being sent out.
Micah Cooper, project leader for the Google e-mail effort, said e-mails were delayed because the Google system incorrectly read the university-wide messages as spam.
According to Cooper, students are contacted through an e-mail distribution list that is still run on the old Microsoft Exchange system. This distribution list, which acts as master listserv when messaging students, has not yet been migrated to the Google system.
Cooper said the Google system has an automatic defense against spam sources, which are sources that send large amounts of e-mails at the same time.
"If you have a site that is blasting tens of thousands of messages, the system will slow it down so that if it is spam it will become less effective," Cooper said.
The Exchange distribution list sent approximately 16,000 messages in each university-wide e-mail. Cooper said this qualified the distribution list as a source of spam, causing e-mail deliveries to be slowed down.
"We're already talking to Google to make sure it doesn't happen again," Cooper said. "We're going to move the lists out of Exchange."
He said a Google-supported distribution list should solve the problem.
Although temporary, students were affected by the faulty communication.
Senior Bryan Lincoln said his marketing group was inconvenienced by e-mail delays.
"We had a big presentation this week and we sent each other individual parts of our project through e-mail," Lincoln said. "The e-mails weren't sending, so none of our attachments were getting delivered in time."
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Junior Kristen Krempp also had issues with her e-mail when she had to coordinate her sorority for Puttin' On The Hits practice Jan. 27.
"I had three (e-mails) that showed up 24 hours after they were sent," Krempp said. "It does matter. It was an e-mail I was supposed to forward to our new pledge class about a new dance practice, and no one got it in time. I got the e-mail a day later and the practice time had already passed."
Cooper said e-mail delays can also occur if servers are overwhelmed or if a link between two servers is down. Although these problems can happen at any time, he said in this most recent case, the Google server may have been overwhelmed after it received what it believed to be thousands of spam e-mails. He said students may experience delayed e-mails from time to time when the Miami servers have extra activity.
Cooper said e-mails are usually rerouted when a system becomes overwhelmed or a link is down, which causes a delay. According to Cooper, the rerouted e-mails can go long distances because Google has servers all over the world. An e-mail that is sent within the university can be rerouted to places like California, Cooper said.
Blackboard showed similar slowdowns and many students were unable to sign onto the site during the worst days of the storm.
Cathy McVey, client advocate for Miami University IT Services, said the outages were due to university communications being posted to the MyMiami site.
E2Campus, an update system, posts the automatic alerts seen at the top of the Blackboard homepage, McVey said.
"When it posts to MyMiami, you see MyMiami slow down within a few hours," McVey said.
E2Campus shut down the site for a couple of minutes to solve the problem, McVey said. The site was functioning normally after it was reactivated.
"We've seen this happen in the past and haven't been able to diagnose the source (of the problem)," McVey said. "They are definitely related, but we haven't figured out what exactly is going wrong."
Assistant Director of Applications Services Kent Covert said Blackboard glitches may occur at times when E2Campus is not posting to MyMiami.
According to Covert, there are several systems operating every time a student logs in to Blackboard.
He said the Blackboard site is an application that is supported by a database, which stores all of the information for each student.
To further complicate matters, Covert said Blackboard runs on other systems that perform tasks such as authenticating passwords and unique IDs.
"There are so many pieces and systems that are involved with Blackboard," Covert said. "If one is having problems, you might not be able to get on."
He said the most common system that could experience problems is a student's wireless network.
"Oftentimes things happen that seem like a Blackboard outage, but it isn't," Covert said. "Many times there are problems and people don't report it so we can't fix it."
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