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Chris Butler
Director of Information Technology
Intercollegiate Athletics
cbutler@oregon.uoregon.edu
Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone who is upgrading older versions of Eudora to 5.2 and storing mail on a NetWare server.
Newer versions of Eudora have a feature called “Mood Watch” that attempts to rate email messages for “offensive” content. One of the settings (found in the Tools-> Options->MoodWatch menu) is “scan stored mail in background.” The consequences of selecting this option can be dire.
Case in point: One of our users had over 10,000 stored messages, with some individual folders containing more than 2,000 messages. His .toc (table of content) files were quite large, and after he upgraded to Eudora 5.2, Eudora began filtering all of his stored messages in the background.
This in turn caused the program to constantly rewrite the .toc files as quickly as possible. Since his .toc files were up to 1.5MB in size, system administrators saw his KB/Write/sec numbers on our NetWare server go off the charts, effectively saturating his network card. Only quitting out of Eudora would stop the flood.
Once the server had continually written and deleted a few gigs of his data, things started breaking down and the server processor utilization went through the roof, negatively impacting the other 150 users on our server (a MoodWatch denial of service attack!).
How we solved the case: Our first clue about the source of the problem emerged when we looked at the salvageable deleted files in this user’s Eudora directory and saw many instances of the same .toc files separated by only a second or two.
We were also fortunate enough to have AdRem Server Manager for NetWare, and we used it to monitor this user’s traffic statistics and opened files. I would not have been able to diagnose this problem without this tool. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend you download the free trial version at http://www.adremsoft.com/index.php and check it out.
Lesson learned…We now turn off Eudora Mood Watch entirely. Or, if the user wants to activate that feature, we make sure to turn off background scans when upgrading Eudora.