Policy on E-mail SPAM

 

This department does not condone the practice of sending unsolicited, impersonal e-mail to people for the purposes of advertising or promotion when there is no reasonable expectation that the e-mail will be acceptable to them. Impersonal e-mail is rarely acceptable.

In an attempt to deal with this problem, we have enacted the following e-mail policies.

  • We do not allow SMTP relay services; mail must either be destined for or coming from a local (csd.uwo.ca) user.

  • We do not accept any e-mail for delivery until the domain name of the sender passes DNS resolution.

  • We categorically reject all e-mail which purports to come from a local site but which is demonstrably not local.

  • We categorically refuse all e-mail from anyone listed on the RBL+ list published by mail-abuse.org

  • We categorically refuse all e-mail from sites which, while not listed in the RBL+ list, have been found to be SPAMMing our users.

  • We do not allow off-campus people to send e-mail to internal mailing lists which are intended for faculty, staff, and student use only.

These rules stop e-mail from the majority of offensive users and/or sites. However, it is not, and cannot be, complete; users will still receive unwanted e-mail. (Why?)

Users who do receive e-mail spam should follow the steps outlined below before asking the Postmaster to add a user or site to the rejection list.

  • Is the e-mail targeted to you personally, or was it to a list to which you subscribe?
    If to a list, contact the list maintaner to see if spam can be filtered out before reaching the list.

  • If the spam contains any unsubscribe instructions, try to follow them. (Yes, we realize that they rarely work, but they already have your address...)

  • Contact the postmaster at the offending site and request that they deal with the spammer. (Try to contact only the spammer's postmaster and not all of those in any relay he is working through.)

  • Only if none of these work, or the volume of spam is extremely high, should you contact the postmaster@csd.uwo.ca.

Please recognize that it is your e-mail address that the spammer's have got hold of and that they likely got hold of it because you made it public. Since you made it public, we would really appreciate your assistance in stopping the problem.

 

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