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E-mail change for Cox Subscribers

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The popular local broadband ISP, Cox, has made recent changes to how it handles electronic mail. These measures were taken to prevent malicious users from exploiting Cox for Spam or e-mail based network attacks.

Technically speaking, they have blocked port 25 (SMTP) except for Cox subscribers sending mail through Cox’s mail server. This will not have an impact for most subscribers. If you have not already followed Cox’s recommendations for outbound mail, you must reconfigure your mail application to use their server.

This will also affect users who use a laptop both with the Cox service and UCInet and have been able to use the same mail configuration in both places, which is no longer possible.

Cox provides detailed information at: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,7081800~root=cable,ath~mode=flat

Manage Your Mail

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How big is your US Mail mailbox at home? What would happen if you read your mail, but returned it to your mailbox? It would get increasingly stuffed and tax the ingenuity of your mail carrier until one day there would be no way to bring you your mail. If you got a bigger mailbox, you would only delay the problem.

Electronic mail suffers from the same limitations. There is only so much disk space allocated to your inbox, and a message that won’t fit will be returned to sender. So, unless you delete or choose some other place to store mail you’ve read (“refiling”), first large messages and then even small messages can’t be delivered to you.

Even with the best management, some faculty receive large attachments, and only a few of them are sufficient to strain email capacity. NACS is piloting a Web-based file sharing system that will provide a means of collaborating on large files superior to using attachments.

Instructions for using several popular mail reading programs can be found at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/email/handouts.html You can check your disk space usage and limits at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/cgi-bin/check_quota.cgi

Filter your spam

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For those of you tired of spending 1/3 of your time with your e-mail deleting unwelcome advertising and other invitations, there is a new feature of the campus e-mail service which will help.

NACS has recently deployed SpamAssassin on the campus mail routers, which scans all incoming mail for telltale signs that a message may be spam. Based on its calculations, it will insert “header” information into the message which will provide a strong hint as to the nature of the e-mail message. (A header is a non-message part of an e-mail, such as the source of the e-mail, the time it was sent, the subject, and certain information about the kind of content in the “body” of the e-mail.)

These extra header lines can be seen by most e-mail readers, and you can configure your favorite application to automatically file or delete messages which meet certain kinds of criteria. Don’t want to be invited to XXX web sites? Teach your application to toss them out! Don’t want electronic junk-mail (“buy! buy!”)? Toss it out!

Information on how to configure various popular e-mail readers in use at UCI can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/spam-assassin.html

Reducing spam

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NACS has been receiving an increasing number of complaints about unwelcome, unsolicited e-mail. These messages sometimes advertise products, services, or web sites, and other times they are fraudulent attempts to gain information to use against campus personnel and computers.

This “Unsolicited Commercial E-mail” (UCE), also called “spam” (note the lower case — “SPAM” is a trademark of Hormel) has risen in frequency, breadth of distribution, and offensiveness of content. But there is such a diversity of mail, and a diversity of reaction to a particular message, that there is no simple solution for protecting faculty, staff, and students from this unwelcome intrusion.

NACS has long been identifying Internet hosts which seem to be associated with a large volume of spam, and rejecting e-mail from them. While this greatly reduced the amount of annoying e-mail the campus received in the past, it no longer has a significant effect. Something more is called for.

NACS is evaluating a number of products that promise to help the situation. Programs like SpamAssassin can be installed on mail servers or individual computers, and told what kind of mail is not welcome. If you would like to participate in evaluation of anti-spam programs, please contact NACS.

Here are some helpful URLs on the subject.

spam in General:
http://spam.abuse.net/
http://www.cauce.org/

Advanced Fee Fraud/Nigerian 419:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/3056833.html
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml

Anti-virus Mail Scanning

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Several changes to the campus electronic mail delivery system have been made recently to improve network security, without adversely impacting performance.

The number of computer virus infections has been steadily increasing over the past several years and is continuing to rise. Many computers are lacking the necessary virus detection software and do not have the most recent security patches to prevent virus infection.

NACS has therefore modified the campus Mail Transfer Agent computers (MTAs) to employ software called “MailScanner” and “Sophos Anti-Virus Interface” (SAVI) to limit the number of viruses campus personnel receive via e-mail.

MailScanner is software which examines every e-mail message coming onto campus. If the message has an attachment, it hands the attachment to SAVI, which tests the attachment to see if it carries a virus. Details of these mail processing steps are available athttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/virus-scanning.html The database SAVI uses to identify viruses is automatically updated every night.

The campus receives approximately 180,000 messages a day, and to compensate for the additional computation represented by MailScanner and SAVI, the MTAs have been upgraded to new SunFire 280R systems. In the first few weeks of use, MailScanner and SAVI successfully deflected 10,000 viruses a day, representing about 7% of the total mail volume the campus receives. 75-80% of those viruses have been “Klez” which is particularly harmful as it disguises the actual sender of the attachment. Because of this, some people on campus have been warned they sent viruses that they were not, in fact, responsible for. NACS has decided to temporarily cease issuing notifications to senders of viruses, due to the confusion this causes.

While e-mail is the most common way of getting a virus, and while the new system limits e-mail borne viruses from off campus, individual owners should remain actively involved in the protection of their systems from viruses. Seehttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/security/virus.html for more information.

Future efforts will include an assessment of the feasibility of removing Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE or Spam). Comments are welcome: nacs@uci.edu