University emails 'blocked from Hotmail' Thousands of students and university staff have been unable to contact Hotmail users because of an unidentified network fault. According to Oxford Brookes university on Friday, Microsoft was blocking email originating in its network and those of other universities "on what appears to be a random basis". UK universities connect …
FWICR this uni uses SAV and perm greylists anyone if the SAV call fails - they do not seem to keep an SAV cache. They will NOT discuss whitelisting commercial domains. This has resulted in thier very low mail rep and periodic inclusion in various blacklists. No suprise they eventually ended up being blacklisted by a major ISP.
Blocked eh?
May be unrelated but....
If their ISP is using re-sold Tiscali services.
And all email on the tiscali network get bottlenecked through a few mail filters.
And Tiscali mail filters got put on a spam blacklist like they did the other day, making sure that hotmail et al would reject all email from them for a few days.
Our uni mail servers are often blocked by hotmail/Yahoo etc. It only needs one machine on our network to be infected with a mailer that uses exchange, and their (hotmail etc) automatic spambot detector blocks our email gateway server. We then have to switch to a new server and contact them to get our server un-blacklisted.
Its not really a problem. it happens quite a lot, so we have lots of servers we can switch to, but it often takes a couple of hours for users to report that emails are being blocked.
Email problems with hotmail is nothing new with universities, we have this problem at the university I work on a regular basic.
Then we get moaned at as the emails from students haven't been replied to...... and they wonder why we insist on them using their university issued address.... (mind you, since we moved to MS exchange we've had more problems).
And this is why blacklisting IP addresses is a bad idea. When you have up to a thousand or more domains sharing a single mail server, hence a single IP address (or even a small range of IP addresses), it's ridiculous to think that it's acceptable to block that IP address based on spam originating from it (especially if it's only a couple of messages). Blacklisting IP addresses only works properly when only one domain is using that address. I understand the desire to reduce the load on your server coming from spambots, but blacklisting IP addresses is not a reasonable way to do so. The potential for far-reaching collateral damage is just too great.
The same one where Indian Masters students have to ask you how to print? The same one with such an aversion to commercial software that they will not install FREE versions of Visual Studio but instead put old cover CD copies of Delphi 6 and Dreamweaver *3* (sadly not a joke) on pooled machines?
The same Uni where I had to walk out of a "web design" class when we were instructed to use framesets and a SMIL "animated intro" synced to a WAV file on a homepage?!
I used their SMTP server for a couple of years to relay email for my personal account via the internal network, no wonder they are getting blocked.
Mines the one with the 3p bit of green paper put through a mail merge, folded in half, my photo stuck on with Pritt Stick and laminated - that's the Oxford Brookes University "ID Card" that nobody outside the Uni believes is real (try getting a student discount with something you can make yourself in 5 minutes). No expense spared by IT either if seems.
My university recently migrated over to the windows live exchange crap. Shortly after Microsoft kindly blacklisted the university domain (well the staff's domain) so all the staff emails and announcements went to the ol junk folder.
That's joined up thinking at it's best!
So no, this isn't pushing people onto their services, you don't need to pay Microsoft for them to screw you :)
not suprising - with the number of infected systems on Uni subnets it doesnt take much for
the extenal mail relays to block UK university IP space. infected systems configured with the correct university SMTP address will send out lots of spam cr*p which then triggers the protection at the remote ISP - ding! the universities SMTP server is then blocked - killing all traffic from that uni to that ISP. great technology. solutions? better spam/virus filtering at the SMTP level, authenticated sending direct back to ISP (and allow such traffic) - thus the user themselves can be blocked at the correct level...further answers on a postcard please.
nice to see the reference to MS exchange. heartening.
You realise that Oxford Uni (ie the real one) is moving its Alumni email system to Hotmail?
Heaven help the whole of Oxford... it'll be an email blackhole soon... someone there was smoking something pretty damn amazing when they figured one of the most prestigious Universities in the world could slum it with the rest of us plebians on something like Hotmail... *shudder*
"They even blackhole mail rather than rejecting it in many cases."
Actually, spam SHOULD be blackholed rather than rejected. Virtually no spam actually comes from the email address listed in the "From" header. As we saw in the early days of spam filtering (and still on some poorly-configured systems today), rejecting mail and sending it back to the "From" address only causes additional traffic and problems -- for you (the receiver) and for the "From" address/domain.
If all spam was rejected and sent back to the "From" header's domain, I have a feeling the Internet would slow to a crawl because of all the additional traffic it would generate. I know for a fact it would melt one of my clients' mail servers considering they get about 98,000 messages sent to invalid addresses. Sending all of those messages back to the alleged originating domains would cause an unnecessary massive increase in resource utilization and outgoing traffic, not to mention the return traffic when the alleged originating domain's mail server sends its own NDR because the address in the "From" header was fake to begin with. And then we've got a ping-pong match, where each side's mail server sends an NDR to a non-existent user.
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