CERN Accelerating science

E-mail - Restrictions When Using Internet at Home or from a Portable PC

  Dietrich Wiegandt IT/DIS

We were forced to take measures recently against the misuse of our resources from senders not at CERN relaying large quantities of commercial mail through our machines. Quite a few people from outside CERN were wondering why CERN was permitting this ``spamming'' by relaying the spammers' mail.

In order to stop this, we now no longer relay mail from external hosts. But of course we do still accept mail from external hosts for CERN destinations. Mail forwarding from a CERN host to an external destination is also not affected by this change of policy. Mail from an external host to an external host routed through one of our mail hosts will however be rejected.

CERN users should not see any obvious change as far as mail to or from them is concerned, but there are, unfortunately, a few exceptions. Users who have copied the mail setup they use on their CERN host to a machine at home or to a portable PC may no longer be able to send mail to non-CERN destinations, because the SMTP server set in their configuration is a CERN machine.

Please ask your Internet Service Provider for the name of their SMTP service machine and replace the SMTP server, smtp.cern.ch or mail.cern.ch, in your mail setup by the name of this machine. Don't change your mail server for incoming mail -- this should remain userid.mailbox.cern.ch. This change should re-enable the sending of mail to non-CERN destinations.

Note that hosts at CERN not registered in the CERN host database are also considered as ``foreign''. Either have the machine properly registered or don't use it for sending mail.

We apologize for the problems that this decision may have caused to some users but we could no longer tolerate this blatant misuse of CERN for commercial purposes.