Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Rutgers has crazy e-mail administrators

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

Rutgers has crazy e-mail administrators

I just tried to send an e-mail to one of my professors at Rutgers, and the e-mail bounced back to me because it had the subject line "Hi". Their mail system considers any mail that begins with the subject "Hi" to be the W32/Goner@MM virus! Wow! That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. They also restrict "Happy New Year", and some other things.

Wow, just tried again. You can't even have "Hi" as the first word of your subject. Here's Rutgers' page listing all their restrictions on what they'll receive in e-mail.

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 2238

13:40 (utc-4)
edited: 14:54 (utc-4)

Comments

With good reason. A mailserver at thehindu.co.in is sending emails to harvested email addresses and pretending to be from other people on that list. It's basically spamming viruses and spoofing who the sender is.

I just realized I forgot to link to Rutgers' page listing all their e-mail restrictions. I've updated the post.

Read the page and tell me it's not a little silly. A college acts like an ISP for its e-mail accounts. Can you imagine if Earthlink or AOL rejected all mail where the subject begins with "Hi"?

I don't disagree that it's not silly and that the Techs need to be given slaps, but I can understand why they're doing it. Problem is, their filtering the emails badly.

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