Information Services has recently enabled authentication checks on the Central Mail Service. It was necessary to enable these checks at short notice, as we were hit by significant abuse of our system as a junk email relay. Whilst this did not directly jeopardise our service, failure to act reasonably quickly posed a real threat of being blacklisted by some sites and networks in other countries, mainly the USA. Furthermore, the support effort in handling the complaints was considerable.
The checks started on 27th October 1997. From this date, all senders of all email which has failed the authentication checks will be issued with warnings. From 4th November 1997 all email failing the authentication checks will be blocked and returned to the sender.
This page explains the reasons why some legitimate email may have failed the authentication mechanisms at the central mailer at the University of Birmingham. It is divided into two sections.
The purpose of the authentication mechanism is to prevent unauthorised use of our facilities. Nobody who has followed Information Services recommendations for setting up the email programs on their computer should be affected. However, it is possible that your system is incorrectly configured either accidentally or because it was set up a few years ago before such access was supported and there was an absence of clear advice.
A variety of software for PCs or Macs uses POP and SMTP. Packages which use this method to provide email include Eudora, Netscape, Internet Explorer and Pegasus when configured in a particular way. This method is popular with dial up users as it can minimise connection time.
In all cases, the software allows you to configure an outgoing SMTP server. This should be the same server as you normally use for your POP server, eg. novell1.bham.ac.uk, novell2.bham.ac.uk, etc. If you have configured your software to use bham.ac.uk as an outgoing server or any other central mail server (mailer0.bham.ac.uk, mailer1.bham.ac.uk or mailer3.bham.ac.uk) your email will fail the authentication checks. The solution is to reconfigure your software to use the same server as you use as your pop server. The exact method depends on the particular software. Please use the Help within the package concerned. If you have difficulty, please contact IT Service Desk which is located in the Library building on the ground floor (Zone GC), telephone number 7171.
If your normal server doesn't support SMTP and you don't use POP to access your email you may still wish to configure an outgoing email server for your World Wide Web browser. Some departmental servers which rely on old versions of software and Charon gateways for email delivery do not support SMTP. In these cases ONLY, you may currently use www.bham.ac.uk as your outgoing server until the software on your normal email server is updated to allow SMTP and POP.
If a departmental server has not been registered with Information Services for email use, email from it will also fail the authentication checks. However, email to an unregistered server will currently fail anyway with a looping error on incoming email. The solution is to ask your server administrator to register the server with Information Services for email use.
If your situation does not match either of the above two categories and you have received an authentication failure is possible an error has occurred. If you believe this to be the case, please contact IT Service Desk which is located in the Library building on the ground floor (Zone GC), telephone number 7171.
If you belong to a site for which the University provides email facilities and your email has failed the authentication checks in error, please contact IT Service Desk which is located in the Library building on the ground floor (Zone GC), telephone number 0121-414-7171.
The University of Birmingham only permits the use of their facilities as a relay for registered campus servers and to sites with which we have agreements to provide email facilities.
If you are completely unconnected with the University, please make other arrangements unless you are sending Unsolicited Commercial Email in which case please stop and find some less antisocial activity to indulge in.
This page was last updated on 27 October 1997. Please mail any comments to C.B.Bayliss@bham.ac.uk