E-mails sent from pitt.edu blacklisted

Looking for that long-lost e-mail? If you’re forwarding your Pitt e-mail to another… Looking for that long-lost e-mail? If you’re forwarding your Pitt e-mail to another server, such as Yahoo or Gmail, you may be searching for a while.

Providers like Gmail and Yahoo automatically blacklist, or block, e-mails from servers that send a lot of spam, said Jinx Walton, director of Pitt’s Computing Services and Systems Development.

“It’s estimated that about 90 percent of e-mail that’s sent is spam,” said Walton. “Eighty-one percent of e-mail sent to the University turns out to be spam.”

Because some Pitt account holders choose to forward their e-mail from their University addresses to other e-mail providers, the spam mail sent to Pitt addresses also ends up in the outside accounts. The outside e-mail providers then confuse the origin of the spam. As a result of the forwarding process, a Pitt address gets attached to it, said Walton. Therefore, the e-mail service provider’s system incorrectly thinks Pitt is sending out the spam and then blacklists Pitt.

Once Pitt has been blacklisted, Walton said, the University must contact the e-mail provider and ask to be removed from the blacklist. “They’ll take us off the blacklist, but then another pile of spam comes through and it could happen again,”said Walton. “If the spam continues to flow, they’re just going to keep putting us back on.”

Walton said the number of problems that occurs is “fairly frequent.” E-mail providers have blacklisted Pitt multiple times in recent months, sometimes several times in a week. “It’s been a problem for us over the past several months because spam has reached an all-time high,” said Walton.

But Pitt’s e-mail system is not defenseless from the onslaught of spam.

While Pitt’s e-mail service has a spam-filtering system as of this past September, Pitt expanded the filter to automatically cover all University accounts that exclusively forward their mail. Pitt has up to 90,000 accounts that only forward mail to other e-mail providers at any given time, said Walton. If a student graduates from Pitt, or leaves for whatever reason, he can still receive e-mail to his Pitt address for up to one year. Any e-mail sent to his University account is forwarded to a different service provider.

Fewer spam messages now reach Pitt inboxes. Upon activating the filter, the system caught 30,000 spam e-mails from a collection of 45,000 e-mails forwarded to Gmail, said Walton. Yet the issue is unresolved. “Right now there’s still about 8,000 accounts in the University who don’t have spam filtering,” said Walton.

“We’re going to put spam filtering on all of those, and we’re hoping that’s going to come as close to eliminating the problem as we can get.”

All new Pitt e-mail accounts come equipped with spam filtering turned on. But the 8,000 unfiltered accounts were created before Pitt had a spam filtering system, and therefore their filters might still be off. CSSD also created two different electronic paths for e-mails to follow. This means that if an outside e-mail provider blacklists Pitt, it won’t accept e-mails automatically forwarded from the Pitt account. But Pitt users will still be able to send regular e-mails to people using that outside provider.

Sometimes, however, e-mail providers will slow the delivery of mail from a spam-soaked source but not block it entirely. Whether the mail is blocked or delayed depends on the amount of incoming spam.

Alexandros Labrinidis, a computer science associate professor, said if e-mail from Pitt’s system is delayed but not blocked, it’s being graylisted. Delivery can be slowed for hours or even a whole day.

Labrinidis said he forwards his University account e-mail to Gmail, and he has experienced problems with delays. He said he still favors Gmail, however, because it gives him more space and allows him to customize his settings.

“If you compare Gmail to the service the University has, it’s also the benefit of space,” he said. “Right now I have no problem storing all my e-mail there.”

Some Pitt students agree that the quota of space provided for each Pitt e-mail user is too small.

“I get too many e-mails and the box fills up way too fast,” said sophomore John Schwartz.

Schwartz said he forwards his e-mail to Gmail, but he hasn’t experienced any problems with blacklisting. To avoid graylisting and blacklisting problems in communicating with students, Labrinidis asked his students their preferred e-mail contact address. More than half of his students gave him accounts different than their Pitt addresses. Other schools, such as Penn State and Harvard universities, also face the problem.

“Most higher education institutions are encountering [blacklisting],” said Walton.

Walton advised that disregarding your University e-mail account is unsafe if you forward your mail.

“If you’re going to forward mail, also have it delivered to [your University account]. That way you’re always sure you’re going to get it should some kind of a blacklisting situation occur.”