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149th MEETING of the BOARD of the OHIO PUBLIC LIBRARY INFORMATION NETWORK (OPLIN)
Annual Planning Meeting

OPLIN office

April 10, 2015 — 9:00 am to 2:00 pm

1. WELCOME and CALL TO ORDER — Jill Billman-Royer
2. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA — Jill Billman-Royer **
3. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION — Jill Billman-Royer
4. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES of February 13 meeting — Jill Billman-Royer **
5. ACCEPTANCE OF THE FINANCIAL REPORTS — Jamie Pardee **
6. REPORTS ON STATUS OF OPLIN SERVICES — OPLIN staff
   1. Email
      • Listservs

We've been able to successfully retrieve all the emails sent and received by each account that were still stored on the old email server, and they are now grouped into folders by account. We've done a test delivery of those emails to OPLIN staff, with good results, and are in the process now of preparing login credentials that we can send to all the other accounts.

A few things to know (and these will be repeated when we send login credentials):

We have reports that several libraries have successfully registered for Office 365 Education plans at http://products.office.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-365-education-….

The initial form you fill out is pretty simple, and looks like the screenshot we've saved at http://oplin.org/files/officetrial.png.

We speculated earlier that we might be able to recover people's old emails that were stored on the Zimbra server if we could complete three steps:  1) determine if any of the 6+ million files were actually individual email messages stored in a standard format;  2) sort the emails by sender and/or receiver;  and 3) deliver the emails to the sender and/or receiver.

Step one is done. We have determined that we do indeed have copies of all the emails that were stored on the server, and they are in a standard format.

Here's what we've discovered so far about alternate email services.

Many libraries are going with 1&1 hosting, http://www.1and1.com/, which is what's powering the email accounts SEO is now going to be providing to SEO libraries.

The state email hosting service that state agencies use will not be a good fit for libraries, as the price per month (pretty high) includes many services aimed at state agencies, which drives up the cost per user per month.

from Stephen Hedges, OPLIN Director

After yesterday's stunning announcement about the demise of the OPLIN email service, people are understandably beginning to wonder, "How was this decision to terminate the OPLIN email service made?"

First, let me emphasize that the OPLIN Board did not have an opportunity to discuss this decision. In fact, because of an email problem, they did not even receive notification of the decision until after it had been published on the Internet. This was my decision, and here is how it happened.

Yesterday afternoon, after we got a temporary mail transfer server working (see the "bit of a help" posting elsewhere on this page), the end of life date for this temporary server was rather arbitrarily set at April 3 (four weeks). We can't move our own office email to a new permanent service as long as the temporary transfer service is running, thus we have to set an end date.

We're getting quite a few questions about recovery of old emails from folks (like me) who didn't use an email client on their desktop and kept everything on the web.

The short answer is: We don't know, yet.

So what happened to the email server?

We had Zimbra version 8.0.2 running on an Ubuntu 10 server. The server needed upgraded to Ubuntu 14, because Ubuntu 10 reaches its End of Life date next month, but 8.0.2 can't run on Ubuntu 14.

The OPLIN email server suffered an unrecoverable failure on Friday. Multiple attempts to restore from backups were unsuccessful, and it is now clear that restoration from backups is not possible. We are therefore preparing a list of alternate email services for libraries, since the oplin.org service will no longer work. Watch the oplin.org website for further information.

Please pass this information to any colleagues who had OPLIN email service.