Once a convenient alternative to leaving messages on an answering machine, email has become both an almost irreplaceable communication resource and an annoyingly exploited involuntary advertisement and network attack medium.
NACS has taken many measures to return email to a usable and trustworthy service, including aggressive spam filtering and restricting to UCI affiliates the ability to send using campus resources.
The latest step in the program was to require UCInetID authentication to use the campus email gateway “smtp.uci.edu” even when sending mail from on campus. This step was taken to prevent compromised systems from having free rein from inside the campus firewall to email spam and viruses.
This change does not affect people with departmental email servers which provide the SMTP service. It also does not affect users of the Webmail service.
By now most faculty and staff who need to have altered the configuration of their email program (for example, Eudora or Outlook) to “authenticate” (prove their identity with their UCInetID and password). Instructions for doing so can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/authsmtp.html and the NACS response center (949-824-2222, nacs@uci.edu) remains available to help solve any residual problems.