From the Help Desk ... Reporting Spam at HKUTired of deleting spam mails sent to your email account? Wish there is more you can do about spam mails? The problem of spam and what you can do about it was discussed in a previous article appeared in Issue 84 of Computer News. In that article we recommended that our users should report the spam cases to SpamCop by themselves directly. To help our users report cases of spam to SpamCop more easily, the Computer Centre has recently set up a spam reporting facility, i.e. spam-report@hku.hk, to ease the reporting process for HKU members. SpamCop provides a free service which would lead to "punishing" spammers for sending you their junk mail. Spammers may lose their email accounts and even get charged "cleanup fees" by their internet providers. The effectiveness of fighting spam in this way could be arguable as cunning spammers switch to different email addresses from time to time. Nevertheless, reporting them helps in the hard combat against spam. The Computer Centre has set up an email account to facilitate HKU members to file a spam report. The email account is associated with a program which will automatically forward the spam report to SpamCop. If you would like to report a spam, forward with the full-header of the spam mail and the content to: spam-report@hku.hk The spam mail must not be over three days old from the date it was received. Users who used to send their spam reports to 'abuse@hku.hk' previously are advised to send the reports to this new address prepared just for this purpose instead. How to view the full header of an email? For procedures on how to reveal the full header of an email message using various email reading programs, e.g. Eudora, Netscape, Outlook Express, please refer to http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/19.html The full header contains information on the IP address of the mail server from where the spam mail was sent. This IP address will be submitted to SpamCop. SpamCop will notify the system administrator of the spammer by email and determine whether the originating server is an Open Relay server or not. If it is determined to be an Open Relay, then the IP addresses of the originating server will be black-listed in the ORDB (Open Relay Database). What is the Open Relay Database The Open Relay Database (ORDB.org) is a non-profit organisation which stores a list of email servers which are open relays of SMTP (simple message transfer protocol). These relays are, or are likely to be, used as hubs for sending unsolicited bulk email. By accessing this list, system administrators can elect to deny email exchange with these servers. The ORDB itself does not block email. It is merely a database for looking up whether a certain server is an open relay or not. Any blocking that takes place occurs on the side of the mail server system for processing incoming emails. Why is my email rejected by the remote server? If your email to someone was rejected and in the return message there are words such as black-holed or black-listed, this is probably the consequence of the Open Relay Database service described above. Most likely what happened is that the remote server has blocked the delivery of emails coming from your mail servers. What you should do in the meantime is:
If you are a departmental server administrator, and your users come to you for not being able to send mail, the problem is most likely what was described above. Your departmental server may be black-listed in the ORDB and hence mails from your server are blocked from proper delivery by the remote email server systems. If you get a warning from the Computer Centre who in turn received a notice from SpamCop that your server has been used as an open relay, you must take immediate action to close the relay on your departmental server. Check http://www.ordb.org/faq on how to send a request to remove your mail server from the black-list and how to close an open-relay.
Mabel
Chau
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