Email at Fermilab

Email News

.zip Attachments Blocked on Email Gateways - March 25th, 2008 Due to a new security threat, we are now temporarily blocking .zip files on the email gateways. If you need to have someone send you files via email, please let them know that they will have to use a different packaging format, as .zip files won't get through. As an alternative, you can use tar+gzip, rar, or rename zip files to not end in .zip.

Problem with MailGW 2 Yesterday - October 3rd, 2006 There was a problem with one of the email gateway systems discovered yesterday that caused email from the last couple weeks, that may have been assumed lost, to finally get delivered. What happened was, emails that can't get delivered are queued and retried some time later. Due to a problem on one of the two email servers, the database that manages the retry queues got corrupted, so some emails that had problems didn't get retried. Monday we discovered inconsistencies in this database and re-synced it. This caused all the "lost" emails to finally get delivered. We believe we understand the underlying problem and shouldn't be seeing this problem again.

Spam Filtered Before Going Offsite - October 2nd, 2006 In order to prevent Fermilab mail servers from being blacklisted as spam sources, we have implemented a filter that will block emails being sent to servers outside the Ferimilab network if they have a SpamAssassin score higher than 8.0. The messages will be held for 7 days and then discarded if there are no requests made to retrieve the message.

Using SpamAssassin with Listserv The latest upgrade to the Listserv software now allows list owners to filter out spam. On October 12th, 2005, a change will be made so that all email that is tagged as spam (currently, mail with a spam score of 5 or higher), will be sent to the list owner(s) for moderation. List owners can then decide whether or not they wish to allow the message to be sent to the list (by forwarding the message back to the list) or if the message should be deleted. More

Spam Reporting System Available There is now a form available for reporting spam email that was not tagged as spam, as well as non-spam email that was eroniously tagged as spam. The reported emails are fed back to the postmaster, who will then review them and process them into the Bayesian Filtering module on the spam tagging machines. Reporting a single email will not necessarily change the way the same email may be tagged in the future, but should correct most mistakes that affect a large number of users. Since the activation of the Bayesian Filtering module we have seen an almost 10% increase in the amount of spam being tagged.

Problems using smtp.fnal.gov from home There have been a few reports of people trying to use smtp.fnal.gov from home via a ISP to send mail and it isn't working properly. This is generally a ISP problem as they block access to the SMTP port in an attempt to try and reduce the amount of SPAM that orginates from their domain. Please see this document for information on diagnosis of this problem and how to resolve it.

Email Virus Handling - March 9th,2004 Beginning Tuesday March 9th, 2004, the FNAL Email Gateways will stop delivering messages that are identified as containing a virus.

Spam Tagging at Fermilab - March 2nd,2004 The FNAL Mail Gateways will soon support the marking of suspect email as SPAM. More information is available

IMAP over SSL - October 15th,2003 The IMAP servers support the use of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt communications between the IMAP client and server. Information on client configuration is available.

Mail Gateway Attachment Filters - September 22nd,2003 Starting the week of September 15th, 2003 the mail gateway adminisitrators have observed long wait times for mail to be delivered. These delays were 1 - 2 hours for mail to make it from offsite through the gateways. This was caused by the overhead of the AntiVirus scanning software as the amount of mail infected with W32/Gibe and W32/Swen coming onsite has been rather high. In order to try and prevent these delays (and viruses from spreading onsite) a configuration change was made to block attachements with the following extensions from coming ino the FNAL site from offsite: vbs pif com exe scr In keeping with our policy of not deleting incoming mail the message will still get delivered. The body of the message will not change. The following will be added: The original document has been removed from this message. The document was removed because Possible Malicious Email Content Detected The message contained the following: This is the same as the current gateway AntiVirus message but without the virus being named. We realize that this may cause a inconvience to some users but there are numerous ways to transfer files that are blocked. If you need any assistance in this please contact the FNAL Helpdesk (x2345 or http://www-csd.fnal.gov/helpdesk/cd/

IMAP Message Size Restriction - May 6th,2003 Due to Denial of Service problems with very large messages being sent to IMAP users a size restriction has been placed on messages sent to IMAP users. More information is available.

Relay List going away - April 24th,2003 With the availability of Authenticated SMTP we have started the process of phasing out the relay exemption list for users who travel. The relay exemption list will be removed on May 15th, 2003. After that date the use of Authenticated SMTP will be required to relay mail through the Fermilab mail gateways. See http://computing.fnal.gov/email/smtp-server/tls.html for more details as well as client configuration information.

Authenticated SMTP - April 3rd,2003 Authenticated SMTP has been enabled on the Mail Gateways. This will allow any authenticated user to relay through the gateways as necessary. Please see http://computing.fnal.gov/email/smtp-server/tls.html for more details as well as client configuration information.

Email System Status Check here for the current operational status of our Email systems and scheduled downtimes.

Email Help If you have email issues please open up a request with the Computing Division Helpdesk instead of sending email to postmaster@fnal.gov. Use of the Computing Division helpdesk will help the email support team to respond to user requests in a timely manner. The CD Helpdesk web page is: http://www-csd.fnal.gov/HelpDesk/cd/

Web Mail The IMAPServers also support web based access to the mail stored on the IMAPServers. This is available at http://imapserverX.fnal.gov where X is the number (1,2,3) of the IMAPServer that your mail is on. SSL encrypted web mail is also available

Problem with rcvtty program (14 May 2002) : It has been noted that there is a problem with sending mail if you use "rcvtty" in your .forward file on fsui02 and fsui03. The problem is that sender receives a "Returned Mail" with errors pointing to rcvtty even though the recipient receives mail okay. We noticed this problem after the upgrade of these machines to solaris2.8. The computing division is no longer supporting mh, exmh and rcvtty so no updates have been made to the code in a long time. It is our recommendation that you remove the rcvtty line from your .forward file to avoid confusion. If you have any questions or concerns, please forward your mail to fnalu-admin@fnal.gov FNAL

Users can check/modify their forwards and change their passwords by looking at this webpage. Note: In the username box users must put their USERNAME NOT their username@fnal.gov Their INITIAL password corresponds to: your FNAL imap account password (if you have one) For account help please contact the Fermilab Postmaster at postmaster@fnal.gov

Email relaying disabled

As of 4/29/1999 Mail Relaying through the site mailserver has been disabled.

Change your SMTP Host

POP and IMAP users need to change the SMTP server/host on their clients. Please use smtp.fnal.gov instead of fnal.fnal.gov. For further instructions.

Past Email News