Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

Bulk E-mail System Now In Use

After more than a year of development, UNT's "Bulk Student E-mail" system is now in place and operational. This system is intended for use by faculty, staff, and administrators at the University to send official messages to students. A description of the system's implementation can be found at http://www.unt.edu/irc/policy/emailprocedures.htm, but that document doesn't cover some of the "behind the scenes" aspects of the new system. I thought that some readers of Benchmarks would be interested in the technical underpinnings of the system, both as a matter of general interest as well as to gain an understanding of the system's operation that can help in using it. Below is a simplified graphical representation of the process:

The heart of the bulk E-mail system is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol ("LDAP") database of students, faculty, and staff at the University. That directory's data come from the SIMS (student records) and HRMIS (human resources) systems on UNT's mainframe: data on new, changed, or deleted records are extracted from those systems each night and transferred to the UNIX system that hosts the bulk E-mail system. Thus, students' course adds and drops are reflected automatically in the system and faculty members don't have to maintain lists of E-mail addresses of students in their classes.

Sending messages

Only authorized individuals can send messages from the bulk E-mail system and one of the hurdles we had to jump over in developing the new system was determining who was a department chair, who the Registrar is, etc. Currently, there is no machine-readable database showing who are administrators on campus, so authorizations are entered "by hand" into the LDAP directory. Faculty members and the courses they are teaching, on the other hand, are identified through a separate data feed from the SIMS system so their records can be updated in LDAP with rights to send messages to their classes.

The process of sending messages from the bulk E-mail system starts with a Web form that authorized users log into (http://www.unt.edu/bulkmail/). Depending upon their level of authorization the logged-in person sees a list of groups (entire student body, just majors in music, just students in MUMH2040, etc.) to whom he/she can transmit a message. After filling in the form and composing the message, a "send" button on the form initiates the actual transmission of the message.

The system sends messages in a two-step process:

1. As soon as the user presses the send button, it starts a process that extracts E-mail addresses of the selected students from the LDAP database and creates a file containing those addresses plus the message.
   
2. The second stage of the process is a process that "wakes up" every four hours and checks for pending messages. Upon finding the file created in step one, the second program puts the message into the designated students' mailboxes and upon completion of that process sends a confirming message to the sender.

The whole process of extracting addresses and sending the message can be lengthy: our early tests took about four hours to complete a single message to about 15,000 students. While we're continuing to explore ways to tweak the system for better performance, it's unlikely that we're going to be able to significantly improve its delivery speed any time soon, so users who send messages should be aware that their messages aren't delivered instantaneously.