Summary

The Unified Forwarding phase of the AcIS ID System deployment replaces the many mail forwarding mechanisms available to users with a single system. Other forwarding systems may continue to exist while they are transistioned to this unified system.

Motivation

There are currently at least five systems around the university that offer email forwarding. The diversity of systems creates confusion for users because they don't know which one is most appropriate; it also creates confusion for technical support whose ability to diagnose mail forwarding problems is crippled by the many competing systems.

A picture of some of the forwarding options.

In addition, some of the forwarding systems are slow (with a week or more turnaround time); some are unreliable (losing entire batches of mail forwarding requests); and in all cases, if a person wants to disable forwarding, he must issue the request on the system where the original forwaring request was made. Since users often do not remember where they set up forwarding, and since some systems do not currently support a "disable forwarding" option, this process frequently requires costly support involvement.

The single unified approach simplifies the system greatly, thus solving many of these problems.

Specific improvements include:

• The user can perform all necessary mail forwarding changes from one site.
• Changes occur in near real-time (minutes instead of days or weeks).
• Reliability is vastly improved through the use of a single database that is written to directly by the user application.
• Support is simplified, since the task of diagnosing the mail forwarding situation can be resolved by looking in only one place.
• System maintenance costs are greatly reduced because the unified system is much smaller.
• The new system reduces the overall ID System's dependence on Ingres, the legacy ID System database system.

Details

The following are the components of the unified forwarding system:

Name	Description
User Web Application	A web application that allows a user to specify his mail forwarding preferences. This tool must be available to every user with a UNI and password, regardless of current affiliation with the university. The application allows the following choices: Forward to a valid email address Do not forward; deliver to a local email account if it exists, otherwise, bounce mail with "user unknown". Some users (currently faculty and staff) are allowed to choose whether to display the forwarding address address in the directory. This application writes requests to the ID System database.
Alias File Generator	This program takes mail forwarding requests from the ID System database and writes them to alias files suitable for use by sendmail, the program responsible for mail transfer. This program must also invoke sendmail to reread this alias file every time it is generated. By invoking the alias file generator every 10 minutes, we enable updates to occur in near real-time.
Mail Display Backfeed	This program must backfeed mail display information (for the directory) from the new ID System database to the old ID System database.
Alumni Office Feed	This program must write to a file the UNIs and email addresses of all people in alumni feeds.