Corvid mail system overview
Corvid is the name of the email system in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
About
Corvid includes the following components:- Message Store - Where email messages are stored, and the services so you can access those messages
- Message Transfer - Software to transmit, receive, and map email addresses to users mailboxes
- Mailing List - Software to map a single email address to many addresses. Send email to groups of addresses, manage those addresses, and configure how, what, and when those messages arrive.
Why We Made The Change
Corvid is our effort to:- Provide more features, such as generous message store size, web access to email, spam filtering, authenticated smtp servers.
- Improve availability through replication. Multiple servers can each do the work you need.
- Better reliability by using raid storage for the message store instead of regular disk storage.
- More centralized administration instead of distributed administration on each workstation.
- Better predictability with a move toward directory service lookups of email addresses and away from phonetic name matching.
- More adaptable by using standard technology instead of obsolete proprietary technology.
When Corvid Will Be Deployed
Many parts of Corvid are already deployed.
- The message store, cyrus or imap.srv.cs.cmu.edu, has been in service since May 2004.
- The mailman mailing list server has also been in use for over a year. (numbers coming)
The changes that are yet to come are
- The message transfer portion of Corvid to be initially deployed 4Q2005. Exact dates to be determined.
- Wider use of spam tagging and virus filtering on our other services, like mailman and our mail hubs, in addition to our primary message store servers.
What Changes are Most Visible to Users
With the Corvid message store, cyrus, your email is in one location. It does not matter if you are at your work machine, on your laptop, or even using the web client, you will still have the same folders and same content, no matter which client host you are using.
One of the most visible changes are how email addresses are mapped to mailboxes. In previous systems, the mapping included a partial name match, and a phonetic match. This meant that even though an email address like bovik@cs.cmu.edu was unambiguous, and worked for many years, the introduction of another person with the name of Bovik could cause that first address to become ambiguous. The new message transfer portion of Corvid system, set to deploy in 4Q2005, has a set of email addresses associated with each mailbox. No two mailboxes have a common email address. Email addresses are removed only at the users request. Email addresses are added only if they are appropriate, and only if they are not already in use on another mailbox. To explore what addresses are associated with various mailboxes see Corvid Directory Search.
The sieve mail filtering language is used instead of ~/.maildelivery to handle email as it is delivered.
With mailman, the administration of mailing lists is handled through an easy to navigate web pages instead of modifying files on servers. And subscribers to mailman mailing lists have a much larger number of options on how they want their mailing list mail delivered and when.