Unsolicited bulk email, called "spam", is becoming increasingly
annoying for many at York. A growing number of messages tell you
how to get rich quick, entice you to visit "adult only" web sites
and offer ways to make you younger and more attractive.

Spam is more than a nuisance. It is both costly and disruptive.
With junk paper mail, we simply throw most of it away. But what
if it arrived with postage due and with no way to refuse delivery
or refuse payment? This, in effect, is what’s happening with
spam. Even if you are not paying directly for it through dial-up
costs for Internet access, York is paying to store and process it
with storage devices and computers that were bought support the
academic and administrative needs of the University. Why should
we pay to advertise the "products" of spammers?

CNS has dealt with spam mainly by refusing email from well know
spam sites. We also block selected addresses when we receive
reports of abuse. You can report spam by forwarding messages to
[log in to unmask] However, blocking individual addresses is not
very efficient. For every one we block, two or three more start.
Refusing email from well know spam sites is not much better
because spammers can easily use unprotected mail systems at
legitimate sites to relay their bulk mailings. These unprotected
mail systems, called "open mail relays", allow mail from outside
their organizations to be sent to other external addresses.
Spammers who abuse these sites are effectively stealing computing
resources from the open mail relay server.

At CNS we are now taking the additional step of blocking mail
from any open mail relay that has been used to propagate spam. An
organization called MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System,
http://mail-abuse.org) maintains a minute-by-minute database of
open mail relay systems being victimized by spammers and assists
system administrators to fix the problem. The CNS administered
mail servers will query the MAPS database to determine if
incoming email should be rejected. If a message is rejected, the
sender is notified with instructions to contact MAPS and their
local system administrators to close the open mail relay.

Blocking email from open mail relay servers will sometimes result
in legitimate users of the site being temporarily prevented from
sending email to York. Regrettably, there is no way to avoid
this. System administrators and users are notified quickly to
facilitate speedy resolution of the problem at their site. CNS
believes that blocking email from open mail relay servers will
significantly reduce the amount of spam processed and stored at
York and will help to keep your inbox relatively free of junk
mail.

Notes
The sending of bulk unsolicited email from York email accounts is
expressly forbidden by the Senate Policy on Computing and
Information Technology Facilities
(http://www.yorku.ca/secretariat/legislation/senate/computng.htm).

Any reported open mail relays operating within York will be
removed from our network until they have been fixed.

Please direct relevant questions to  Marshal Linfoot -
[log in to unmask]