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]