Configuring e-mail for the College of PNHS

Dealing with spam (unwanted, unsolicited advertisement e-mails) is an ongoing struggle. Recently, spammers started sending e-mail to the Schools' internal mailing lists, and attempting to send e-mail with our mail server ("Sparky"). We have reconfigured the mailing lists, and our mail server, to help reduce the amount of spam coming to our users and passing thru our systems. This has reduced the spam, but has also caused problems for some of our users. There are two areas where we have been seeing problems. The first is in sending e-mail, and the second is in sending e-mail to our in-house mailing lists.

Sending e-mail: From now on, if you want to use our mail server to send e-mail to anyone who is not on our mail server, you must first authenticate yourself (prove your identity) to our mail server to show that you are a legitimate user and not trying to use our server to relay spam to others. The way you authenticate yourself is very simple - you check your mail. Checking your mail requires you to prove your identity, and once you do so, your computer will be allowed to send mail thru the mail server. So, if the server is rejecting your mail, try checking for new mail just before sending messaged. Many e-mail programs can do this automatically.

Since many of our users use "public" computers in the labs and libraries and so on, the permission to send mail will expire after a while, so that when you re-authenticate yourself we know it is still you using that computer. The best solution is to configure your e-mail software to check e-mail automatically every ten to twenty minutes or so. Even if you do not have any new mail, the mail server will reset the countdown on your ability to send mail. How you do this depends on the software you use to send and receive e-mail. Instructions on how to do this, and on how to handle mailing list issues, are available for the several most popular software packages in the list at the bottom of this page.

Using e-mail lists: The e-mail server will always accept mail from anyone, anywhere, provided that the e-mail is addressed to someone who receives their e-mail at our server. (If we didn't do this, no one could send you e-mail). Unfortunately, spammers caught on to this and started sending e-mail to our mailing lists, especially "all@pharmacy.purdue.edu" and the other "all" lists. This resulted in a large volume of spam in a short time. We have made a change to stop this from happening. From now on, in order to send e-mail to one of our mailing lists, you must be a member of that list. This requires that the e-mail address that you send mail from exactly match your e-mail address in the mailing list, or your mail to the list will be rejected.

If you send e-mail to our mailing lists, and your mail has been rejected, you need to configure your e-mail software so that your e-mail address, as listed on your outgoing e-mail, exactly matches the address on the list(s) you wish to send to. How you do this depends on the software you use to send and receive e-mail. Please select your software from the list below. If you are unsure of what form of your e-mail address is used on the mailing lists, please contact your department's head secretary.

• Outlook 2000/2002/2003 & Outlook Express
• Eudora
• Mozilla/Netscape 6 & 7