Technical Committee Report

Last year we talked about fighting spam at the annual meeting, and after getting positive feedback from the members present, we arranged for a new server to process our incoming mail. After much deliberation by the team on the technical details, the implementation was handled by team member Chris Watt through KPC Ltée, a local computer company. A combination of anti-spam and anti-virus software on a Pentium 3 server was built. Of course considerable fine tuning has been required, as well as software updates, but we are currently tagging (and optionally deleting) thousands of spam messages and viruses per day. One measure that we are close to the right level of strictness in our filtering settings is that we are getting few complaints about the filtering, but what we get is a balance of complaints about spams getting through, and messages that are falsely tagged. This will be an ongoing project, as the spammers are tryng harder!

Of course the other big item in 2002 was the implementation of 56K dialup service for Chebucto Plus. After the initial glitches, most of our members were able to connect without difficulty, and get reliable faster service than they had experienced before. We continued to work with the rest, and almost all have been able to connect to the new modems. Many have had to obtain better modems for their computers, or update modem driver software, or have the quality of their phone line improved in order to benefit from our new modem server. In some cases adjustments to their dialup settings was needed. Special thanks to Andrew Wright for working with all the members who have been having these difficulties. Please spread the word - we do have capacity to handle more users!

Of course we could not forget the contribution of Johnathan Thibodeau as our Staff System Administrator, and the many projects that he has worked on for us. And thanks are due also to Jeff Warnica, Michael Smith, Jason Kenney and others for their contributions in improving Chebucto and keeping us out of trouble. Some of the visible projects include the updated Webmail, the MajorCool mailing list administrator tool, Database services for websites, new search engine, and our new Webhosting server.

I want to also mention Norman DeForest and the Helpdesk team for continuing their fine contribution to our Community.

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