Junk Email and Spam

Junk email is any email sent out without regard to whether the recipient is actually interested in it. It may be advertising goods or services, expounding an ideology, or anything else that you don't want to receive. Some of it, e.g. advertising availability of pornographic material, may be offensive to some people. Sending the same mail to large numbers of people is known as "spamming".

In order to reduce the amount of junk email and spam entering our department we are blocking addresses and domains from which at some point we have determined that we had been receiving only junk email and no legitimate mail. The whole list of blocked addresses is here. It is alphabetically ordered starting at the top level domain. It follows a numerically ordered list of blocked IP addresses.

Note that the blocking mechanism concerns only mail sent to the "public" part of our system, i.e., to addresses of the form "username@math.northwestern.edu" or to public machines. It does not affect mail directly sent to private machines, e.g. to "username@hostname.math.northwestern.edu".

If you have root access on your (private) machine and would like to set up anti-spam rules by yourself you may do so in various ways - sendmail access file, ipchains, procmail.... After you have setup your machine ask everybody to send email directly to it instead of the department address "username@math.northwestern.edu". Also you may want to remove or modify masquerading so that the return address points to your machine instead of the departmental address.

Links


Miguel A. Lerma (9/21/2009)