UIT Focused on Fix for Email Delays

Email is an integral part of our work life. That’s why University IT gives special attention to Stanford’s email system, monitoring its many components and ensuring that emails hop from sender to receiver in seconds. When something goes wrong, we direct additional resources to identifying and correcting the problem as quickly as possible.

Recent email delays

Since early February, Stanford experienced several incidents in which emails took extra time (from 15 minutes to two hours) to arrive at their destinations. We understand that these email delays might have caused you significant inconvenience or work stoppages. We apologize for that and want you to know that we are working closely with our vendor partners who provide the various components of the campus email infrastructure to enhance reliability and improve performance.

Working with our vendor partner, Proofpoint, we have identified the cause of the more significant of these email delays: an issue with software used to limit the amount of spam that reaches your inbox. We are continuing to work with Proofpoint to correct this issue as well as a subsequent issue that impacted all Proofpoint clients.

Background: Improving the email infrastructure

Stanford email routes through an intricate infrastructure on its journey from sender to receiver. There are systems for address resolution, spam filtering, encryption, and, of course, storing and reading email, just to name a few.

Over the past several years, Stanford, like most of its peer institutions and much of industry, has moved elements of our email infrastructure from onsite resources to off-campus providers in the cloud. Certainly, the most noticeable of these changes was the campus’ August 2015 move to Microsoft Office 365. Over the past couple of years, we’ve moved other pieces, including spam filtering and encryption, to cloud providers.

Using cloud providers has both benefits and challenges. Among the benefits are:

• Improved business continuity — the geo-diversity of cloud providers positions us to recover quickly from various types of outages, particularly those caused by local or regional disasters.
• More features — the scale of cloud providers’ client base and infrastructure allow it to implement additional service features and enhancements faster.
• Simplicity — by consolidating some functionality with cloud providers, we simplify the email routing UIT manages for sending and receiving email.

Nevertheless, running our email infrastructure in the cloud is different than running it at Stanford. As UIT continues to develop the new expertise to manage cloud providers effectively, it sometimes takes us a little longer to work with our partners to identify and correct issues.

Moving forward

UIT is working rapidly to improve how we manage our cloud-based services to improve performance and increase reliability. We are building closer relationships with our vendor partners and enhancing our processes in our continued effort to provide Stanford the best service possible. Again, we apologize for the recent email delays and welcome your input on how we might further improve Stanford’s email service.

Learn more

For more information about Stanford’s email service, visit our website.

For issues with Stanford email or to provide feedback, submit a help ticket.