By Kelsey Thomas

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UK Information Technology is making changes to combat recent spam attacks on UK e-mail servers. Large amount of spam sent from compromised UK Exchange accounts led to external mail services blocking all e-mail sent through UK.

The Outbound E-mail Policy will now limit Exchange messages to 200 recipients. Sidney Scott, Manager of IT Customer Service, says limiting message recipients will help protect the students and keep UK Exchange from being blocked by other mail services.

“The big thing that this is going to do is going to help us be able to keep the doorway open for our mail that is outbound to other mail services outside of the university,” Scott said. “We don’t want to become the source for spam going to outbound mail. By limiting the number of outbound mail, we are less likely to be blocked by other mail services.”

Other mail services may decide to block UK by the amount of spam their account users receive over a period of time. UK e-mail users have compromised their accounts by giving out their LinkBlue ID and password to spammers that pretend to be legitimate sources. The spammers then use the information to send outbound mail from the account.

“If they ever get a piece of e-mail asking for their user ID and password — specifically anything that asks for your password — (it) is not legitimate. Our policy is not to ask for that,” Scott said.

Scott said the best thing to do when receiving mail that asks for password information is to ignore it or discard it. He also said spammers that may have e-mailed 500 students now only have access to 200 students, protecting a larger number from receiving the spam.

Those who need to send out e-mails to large numbers of people can do that through ListServ, Scott said. ListServ groups must be authorized by the university, so account holders wishing to create one must be members of the UK community.