Update email performance issues

[09 October 2012]

In the past few weeks we have seen increasing reports of staff having difficulties logging into and maintaining a connection to the email service.

We are actively working to resolve this issue and apologise for the inconvenience this is causing.

Over the past year we have seen an increasing frequency of requests made to the main staff email server. Recently this has increased to an extent where the server has become so busy that it refuses connections - leaving people unable to access their email; causing the reported problem staff are seeing with access to email.

Work to reduce the server load and increase the performance of the service is ongoing but in the meantime we are requesting that Mulberry users carry out the instructions detailed below.

Important request for Mulberry users

In an effort to reduce the problem we would ask Mulberry users to ensure that the 'tabs' view is closed when they shut Mulberry down. This will not only reduce the load on the mail server, but will provide the user with a better email experience.

Our monitoring indicates that those who are using Mulberry, utilising it's tabs view, are consuming the majority of the resources available on the mail server. Each tab will open one connection to the server, and keep it open until Mulberry is closed. When a user reopens Mulberry, it reopens a connection per tab and starts actively checking it, even if a user is not viewing that tab, something users may not be aware of.

Instructions for Mulberry uses to close tabs can be found at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/it-services/applications/email/mulberry-tabs.html