Mail Relaying

ECE hosts do not permit relaying of email unless: that mail is being sent from a machine on ECEnet, or is addressed to an ECE machine, or both. This policy is identical to that of NU's IT organization.

The policy was implemented in June of 1998 to prevent ECE mail servers from being used to relay spam/UCE. Rather than repeating what NUIT says in its well-written anti-relay policy statement, we simply refer you to it. For historical reasons, what follows is a Usenet posting by a former CFS manager on the topic.

From: mack23 (Chris Walsh)
Subject: ECE UNIX machines mail config change
Date: 29 Jun 1998 19:01:44 GMT

Effective approximately 11:00 AM today, I made an important change
to the e-mail configuration of zeta.ece.nwu.edu.

In a nutshell, zeta will now only accept e-mail which meets at least one
of the following criteria:

1.  the mail is being sent from a machine whose domain name ends in
    .ece.nwu.edu.

2.  the recipient's address is of the form "username@ece.nwu.edu",
    or "username@eecs.nwu.edu".

Put less exactly, if the mail is not from an ECE machine or to an ECE
address, it will not be accepted.

This is the same configuration that has been running on the department's
HPs for some time.  Later tonight, all departmental Suns and HPs will be
using this configuration.

The reason this change was made is that for the last couple of days, someone
has been illegally using zeta to relay unsolicited commercial e-mail to
thousands of addresses.  This type of "spamming" is rampant, and it is
widely considered to be poor system administration to allow a machine to
do it (as we have with zeta and the other Suns).  IT (formerly known as
ACNS) recently adopted a similar policy.  You can read about it at
http://www.tss.nwu.edu/internet/transit.html.  We have been slowly phasing
this configuration in, but this recent major abuse has forced us to
act more quickly.  

This change WILL affect you if you have your POP client software (such as
Eudora or Netscape) set up to use either "ece.nwu.edu" or "zeta.ece.nwu.edu"
as your SMTP relay AND your client machine is not on the departmental
network AND you send mail to non-ECE addresses.  For example, if you dial 
in to the main University modem pool and try to send mail to an AOL address
via zeta.  Another common example is attempting to send mail to non-ECE
addresses from an ISP account while still using an ECE machine as the
SMTP relay.

The solution is to use your ISP's SMTP relay (they *will* have one), or
(in the case of NU's main modem pool) one of NU's.  If you often use
the IT modem pool, please read http://www.tss.nwu.edu/internet/transit.html.
It does a very good job of explaining what you need to do.

If you always use ECE's modem pool, or send mail using elm, pine, or another
non-POP mail program running on an ECE machine, the changes discussed here
will have absolutely no effect on you whatsoever.

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Wed Oct 22 10:01:55 CDT 2003