Continuing our efforts to keep the UCI campus network a safe and productive environment, NACS has extended its virus blocking and spam labeling (“tagging”) services. Originally limited to the primary campus mail servers (which process email addressed to users “@uci.edu”), these services are now in operation on our central email systems: EA, E4E, pop.uci.edu, imap.uci.edu, and smtp.uci.edu. This means that messages sent directly to users on these machines (bypassing “@uci.edu”) now enjoy these protective measures.

Messages delivered to you that have been identified by the new services as spam will include the following headers:

X-NACS_ES-MailScanner-SpamCheck:
X-NACS_ES-MailScanner-SpamScore:

You must make a change to your email software’s configuration to detect the new headers and take advantage of the additional mail filtering. Please see the online documentation at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/header_filters.html for more information. Check back there periodically, because the information on that site will be refined as we gain experience and as we receive your feedback. Please let us know how these new services are working for you.

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

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

As anyone who uses e-mail knows, “SPAM” is more than affordable protein and the subject of a Monty Python comic sketch. SPAM (or “Unsolicited Commercial E-mail”, UCE) is the electronic equivalent of paper junk mail, although some find it even more objectionable. To an individual, SPAM can be a petty annoyance or a plague, depending on how e-mail is accessed (via a fast network connection, or a slow modem). SPAM is a growing problem on today’s Internet, because its costs are borne by network providers and users rather than those generating it.

SPAMmers are always looking for well-connected systems that will accept their advertisements and relay them to points all over the Internet. This is done to conceal the identity of a SPAMmer, or to allow access to mail servers that have blocked transmissions from the SPAMmer’s own network. Several servers at UCI have been abused in this manner, causing throughput problems and downtime.

Through no fault of its users or operators, abuse by SPAMers can cause a mail host to be placed on an e-mail “blacklist.” Hosts that allow “e-mail relaying” (see the next article) are also blacklisted. E-mail from a blacklisted host is refused by some servers, which can prevent the exchange of important e-mail between Internet users.

SPAM is a tough problem for which there is no complete technical solution. Fortunately, there are several efforts underway to thwart SPAM on the Internet. If you would like more information, please see one of the Web references below:

• http://spam.abuse.net
• http://www.cauce.org
• http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/

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.