University continues efforts to combat spam

Information Technology Services (ITS) Wednesday implemented a modified form of "graylisting" on Penn State's primary incoming psu.edu e-mail servers in order to reduce the amount of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail, commonly known as spam. Graylisting is a form of spam elimination technology designed to temporarily reject e-mail from computers it doesn't recognize, thereby preventing potential spam from being accepted by the official mail processing system. Under this new spam elimination program, only incoming e-mail originating from specific types of cable modem or dsl hosts will be targeted for graylisting. Any e-mail coming from a Penn State IP address will not be graylisted in any way, and e-mail sent from well known e-mail providers, such as gmail.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, stanford.edu, etc., will not be delayed by the new process. In addition, this will not impact the delivery of e-mail from Penn State hosts, such as departmental e-mail servers.

According to ITS staff, this method was effectively employed on another high-profile University server (Listerv) recently, so they predict that applying it to Penn State's incoming e-mail servers will be equally successful. Information about Listserv's implementation of graylisting can be found at http://its.psu.edu/alerts/alert-441online.

Graylisting on the various computer systems and servers that support Penn State's incoming e-mail servers will occur incrementally over a period of one week; therefore, full implementation is scheduled to be completed by Wednesday, Sept. 5.

Questions and requests for assistance should be directed to ITS Help Desk staff at helpdesk@psu.edu via e-mail. More information about Penn State's efforts to combat spam can be found at http://kb.its.psu.edu/topics/email/spam/ online. For information, contact Karen M. Hackett at kmh@psu.edu via e-mail.