OT: redirection, a bad idea???

[Peter Peters]

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Scott Silva wrote on 25-9-2007 21:55:

>> The site www.zepler.net is quite interesting!  I will make sure all
>> people that will work on our email forwarding service look at it. It
>> is really similar to what we want to do.

We offer the same service to out graduate students. We don't have a
special domain but want to show the association with the university in
the address: http://www.alumnus.utwente.nl/

>> Using a different domain name is also a good thing because all
>> students and staff now share the same @usherbrooke.ca domain, creating
>> more and more address conflicts over time: people use
>> firstname.lastname at usherbrooke.ca as their email address; if a
>> conflict arises, the newer person will have the choice of adding a
>> number or middle initial to his email address but this is not really
>> satisfying, IMO.  By removing grad students' email address from the
>> USherbrooke.ca domain, this problem will not get worse every year...
>> but I just realized it will now move to the new domain name
>> instead...  oh well...

Out students have addresses @student.utwente.nl while the staff has
@utwente.nl addresses. But still we have conflicts. In the past
addresses @student.utwente.nl got reused but since a number of our
graduated students decided to start a new study (sometimes after a
decade) we have decided to reserve those addresses.

They get a initials.lastname at student.utwente.nl. Then they get
initials.lastname at alumnus.utwente.nl. When they start a new study they
(and people sending to them) get confused when they don't get
initials.lastname at student.utwente.nl again.

The initials part can be replace by their first name.

> It looks like it has another benefit. If the site does get blacklisted,
> the main mail servers will still be free to function.

We do the forwarding on our MX servers. So these would be the ones
getting blocked. Everybody sending e-mail from inside should use our
outgoing servers. These are different (at least different IP addresses).

But this does not mean we don't have problems with blacklisting. The
forwarding will stop when the MX servers are blacklisted.

BTW, our MX servers are blacklisted in the blacklist.zap lists. We don't
know for sure because they are Microsoft blacklists that are used inside
Exchange when IMF is configured. The MX servers are probably on that
list because they deliver a lot of spam to our Exchange servers.

- --
Peter Peters, senior beheerder (Security)
Dienst Informatietechnologie, Bibliotheek en Educatie (ITBE)
Universiteit Twente,  Postbus 217,  7500 AE  Enschede
telefoon: 053 - 489 2301, fax: 053 - 489 2383, http://www.utwente.nl/itbe
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