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Ohio State University logo Office of Information Technology Systems Status Page

Several ISPs are blocking osu.edu E-mail
Outage Type: WarningStatus: Active
Effective Date: 04-08-2008 13:42:00Expected Expiration: No expiration date
Affected Systems: Email

Over the last several months, the osu.edu mail system has been the recipient of several phishing attacks that were looking for confirmation of username and password information.

Unfortunately, it appears that a number of people affiliated with the university provided this information. As a result, we have had a significant increase in the amount of internal and external spam generated to the central e-mail system.

This has caused some performance problems, both in and outbound and alarmed numerous individuals receiving the spam.

We have also seen a number of Internet Service Providers(ISPs), place osu.edu on their blocked lists

Among those reported as blocking or delaying OSU e-mail are:
  • att.net
  • msn.com
  • hotmail
  • prodigy
  • lycos
  • agri.huji.ac.il
  • some ".mil" areas
  • mchsi.com
  • uaa.alaska.edu
  • dhs.gov
  • comcast.net again blocking
  • cisco.com
  • charter.net
  • comcast.net

E-mail support staff are working with these ISP's to have OSU removed from their block lists

To combat the problem we are identifying the user accounts that are generating the spam and restricting their ability to send mail.

E-mails system support staff have also put extra filters in place on e-mail sent from webmail.