Due to the increased abuse of campus systems as SPAM relays by off-campus SPAMers, NACS has recently disabled “e-mail relaying” on EA, E4E, and Orion. This same change was previously made to the campus Mail Transport Agent (MTA) servers and most DCS-supported UNIX systems.
“E-mail relaying” is accepting e-mail from non-UCI hosts and retransmitting it to other non-UCI hosts. For example, a user at MIT sending mail to someone at the University of Texas using mail servers at UCI. This would happen if the MIT user’s mail software is configured to use UCI systems as its “SMTP” server, instead of using a MIT mail server for this function. The SMTP server is the one that distributes e-mail on your behalf, as contrasted with your POP server, which collects e-mail sent to you and makes it available for your access.
Turning off relay will not impact UCI e-mail users, as long as their software is configured to use the correct SMTP server. Problems sometime arise when people are off-campus and use a commercial ISP to access UCI e-mail. In this case, the ISP’s SMTP server should be used, not one at UCI, even if a UCI E-mail account is being used for receiving and processing mail. A UCI POP account can be utilized from an ISP in conjunction with the ISP’s SMTP server.