Subject: E-mail Policy
ART MATRIX - LIGHTLINK
PO 880 Ithaca, NY 14851-0880
(607) 277-0959 Voice
(607) 277-8913 Fax
(607) 277-5026 Modems
homer@lightlink.com E-mail
jes@lightlink.com E-mail
10/24/03 1:05pm
This file is at http://www.lightlink.com -> NEW USER INFO
E-mail boxes are available for all our customers.
We do not charge for disk space used by e-mail boxes, nor do we
place quotas on the size of e-mail boxes before they bounce mail,
however certain policies are put in to affect to avoid abuse of the
e-mail system.
ABANDONED E-MAIL BOXES
It is an abuse of the e-mail system to allow your e-mail to
accumulate unread for more than 30 days. If a mail box is not read
within 30 days, the existing e-mail is archived and the e-mail box is
closed. Minipops are deleted entirely. They can however be recreated
but only by the original party that first created them. Extensions on
the 30 day time limit for unread mail can be granted on a case by case
basis.
The archived e-mail is kept for another 30 days and then
discarded.
Any mail received after the e-mail box is closed is lost. Once
an e-mail box is closed it will contain a single e-mail explaining
that it was closed and how to reopen it. Mail will NOT bounce to
senders letting them know the box is closed.
The archived e-mail may be restored within 30 days of the
closing.
The above may seem draconian, but the amount of spam coming into
abandoned e-mail boxes is horrific and ruins the mail system if
allowed to continue unabated. Bounces to closed mail boxes are mostly
bounces to spammers, usually to forged addresses, which then get OUR
mail servers blocked by the forged ISP.
NASTY GRAMS
Our e-mail system allows our users to leave mail on the server
even after it has been read. Although this is useful to some, it
means accumulating disk space usage that can grow without bounds.
This is problematic for other users if they don't KNOW they have their
e-mail set to leave mail on the server.
Once a mail box reaches 50 to 80 megabytes, many user e-mail
programs can not download it, and neither can we read it the best we
can do is delete it. Please do not allow your e-mail boxes to grow
beyond 20 megs.
Thus all mailboxes are scanned every night and warning letters
are automatically sent to any user with an e-mail box over 10 megs in
size. Every week automatic warning letters are sent to any user with
an e-mail box over 2 megs in size.
The size of the mail box is not an absolute indicator that the
user is set to leave mail on server, but brings it to their attention
if they do. Some users just get a lot of e-mail and download it every
day, they can safely ignore the warning letters.
LARGEST E-MAIL
The largest single e-mail that may be sent in to or out of our
system is 16 megs. Most e-mail is converted to MIME format before
being sent, which causes the file to get bigger, so expect 16 megs of
actual data to be the usable upper limit. If you need to send or
receive bigger files, please use FTP.
VIRAL FILTERING
We filter out any executable attachments that might carry a
virus, whether or not they are infected, this includes .exe, .com,
.pif, and .scr files. You can send these but not receive them. If
you need to receive an executable as an attachment, have the sending
party zip them up first into a .zip file.
Unfortunately many .zip files contain viruses these days, so just
because you get an attachment that says its a zip file doesn't mean it
isn't a virus.
Since zip files are the only way people can send our users
an executable file, we can not block zip wholesale, but neither do
we have the cpu resources presently to unzip these files to check
for viral infections, that is left to the end users anti virus software.
We do NOT inform either the sending or receiving party that the
viral filtering has happened, because for viral e-mail the sending
party is almost always forged with an innocent victim, and for the
receiving party, during a viral storm, clearing out all the warnings
is just as much a nuisance as clearing out the viral e-mail.
Other ISP's that do send warnings with each virus they receive
are a major part of the problem as no doubt you have received such
warnings when you didn't send the virus in the first place!
OPEN RELAYS and OPEN PROXIES
Lightlink has zero tolerance for open relays or open proxies.
An open relay is a mail server that allows anyone to send mail
through it to anyone else.
An open proxy is usually a machine that is infected with the
latest round of viral infections, that also allows anyone to send mail
through it to anyone.
The virus writers and the spammers are in cahoots with each
other, so most of the spam we get these days comes from open proxies
or machines that have been turned into zombie spam bots.
We filter out ALL e-mail sent from remote e-mail servers that
prove to be open relays, open proxies or zombies. We dont actually
filter the e-mail we block the server at the firewall from talking to
us at all. Thus there is no record of the attempt to send the mail,
or who it was from or who it was to.
Once a server is no infected or misconfigured, and no longer
spamming, and they contact us, we will remove it from our database of
blocked servers. However if they are still open, they will end right
back up again in the blocked databases.
Presently we are blocking over 2 million infected machines trying
to send our users spam or viral infections.
SPAM TAGGING
Our system tries to detect e-mail that might be spam coming into
your mail box and tags it with [SPAM]. You can turn these options on
or off, or leave tagged spam on the server in your spam e-mail box for
later perusal. Spam left on the server is erased every 7 days. For
more information goto http://www.lightlink.com -> SPAM. Beyond these
measures, our system does not filter tagged spam for the end user.
There are no backups for spam left on the server, should the hard
drive crash, its gone.
END USER SPAM FILTERING
Each end user has the ability to further filter their e-mail
using the supplied spam filters built into all e-mail clients, such as
Netscape, Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora. These can be highly
effective in filtering out mail with undesirable content, or mail from
undesirable addresses. You can find out more about how to program
your filters at http://www.lightlink.com/filter.
There are also commercial spam filters you can install on your
machine, such as those from McAfee, Norton's, or www.cloudmark.com.
REMOTE SMTP SERVERS.
Because most infected machines these days try to spam others by
sending e-mail directly to them on port 25, we have blocked all
outgoing mail to port 25 for dialup users and any users without a
static IP on our system which includes radio hot spot users.
Dialup users and hotspot users must use our outgoing e-mail
server to send e-mail at smtp.lightlink.com.
Hotpost users that are found to be infected will be quarantined
from using our hotspots until they get uninfected.
Homer