One of the most significant spam-related problems for BC email users occurs when mail sent from a Boston College email account is rejected as a result of the BC email server being "blacklisted." When under a spam attack, BC forwarding accounts may redirect large amounts of spam to commercial email services like Yahoo, Hotmail, and MSN. These domains mistakenly identify BC servers as the origin of the spam attacks, and refuse or delay the delivery of email from BC. The following information provides further details about Blacklisting and what BC is doing to prevent this problem.
What is an email blacklist?
Why would Boston College's outgoing email servers
get placed on a spam blacklist?
Why does blacklisting cause my email to bounce back
to me?
What is Boston College doing about this?
How can I deal with this blacklist problem?
When spammers send unsolicited bulk email they rarely send it from their own computer or email account: they hack into someone else's machine from off-site and send the spam from there. Anti-spam services, such as SpamCop, gather reports about spam coming from certain machines and publish the names of those machines on a "blacklist." Email system administrators can then configure their systems to filter, reject, or tag any email that comes from a computer that has been blacklisted. By doing so, they hope to keep their own systems free of spam.
Why would Boston College's email servers get placed on a spam blacklist?Many people forward their @bc.edu email to a commercial email service provider, such as Yahoo. When these people receive spam in their @bc.edu account, it is forwarded to their Yahoo account. Yahoo reports the spam to SpamCop, which examines the email header and notes where the message came from. Since the email was forwarded from Boston College, SpamCop assumes Boston College's mail server is being used to send out spam. SpamCop therefore places the IP address of this server on its blacklist.
Why does blacklisting cause my email to bounce back to me?If one of Boston College's email servers has been blacklisted, and you send a message to someone whose email system uses these blacklists to block mail (instead of filtering it), your email gets bounced back to you without being delivered. Most of the time, blacklist entries expire in a few hours, so people never notice. Other times Boston College's email servers can be blacklisted for longer periods.
What is Boston College doing about this?
Boston College ITS has taken many steps to remedy this problem. As a result, users seldom experience delays or rejected email due to blacklisting. For example, Spam Control filtering has been turned on for all forwarded student and alumni email accounts at Boston College. Spam that is filtered into the Junk folder is not forwarded. ITS continues to explore and implement policies that will prevent BC email from being blacklisted.
How can I deal with this blacklist problem?
If possible, contact the person to whom you were trying to send email and ask them to report to their system administrator that your legitimate email was rejected by their system. For further assistance, submit feedback to the ITS Email team. For assistance with repeat rejections or delays, forward the email to bounce@bc.edu.
Many thanks to Stanford University ITS, whose web page on blacklists provided valuable source material.
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