The Email Adventure

I received a response from someone in the IT department this morning:

The decision was made to prevent JMU from being a source of spam messages
and to prevent the entire .jmu.edu domain from having mail blacklisted due
to a single misconfigured mail server on the campus, which has happened
more than once.  However, jI was not involved in this decision or its
implementation.  If you would like to complain about it, I would suggest
doing so to Dale Hulvey (hulveydb@jmu.edu), the Associate Vice President
for Information Technology, who made the final decision..

Fair enough. I'm just glad I managed to reach someone in the IT department as opposed to having to deal with three levels of clueless automatons at the helpdesk. So I fired off another email to Dale:

I've had problems for the past week sending email through an email
account that I keep separate from my JMU mail.  They authenticate
connections to their SMTP server by IP address, so I initially thought
there were DHCP issues and my IP had changed.  Turned out that their
records of my IP are correct, but I still cannot connect to the server.

Today I received an email from a member of the JMU GEEK list stating
that JMU IT has unilaterally shut down all incoming and outgoing SMTP
traffic.  I understand the purposes behind the shutdown, but the fact
remains that there are legitimate uses for SMTP traffic.  I pay for the
outside email account to relieve quota issues I have had in the past (I
am a member of several mailing lists, and my mailbox tends to fill up
quicker than most).  Now I'm unable to send mail through that account.

What can be done to gain access to SMTP traffic again? Thank you for
you assistance in this matter.

AJS

Maybe I can actually get somewhere with this.

March 21, 2002 - 09:12 AM