Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center: General Information

Allowance of "Open Relay" for tenant SMTP mail servers connected to the internet via the VTCRC infrastructure is not allowed. Open Relay is a situation where email spammers from anywhere on the net can send bulk mail through your server. This can cause network deterioration, and even complete outage, for your server and the rest of the Park tenants.

You are required to use and configure SMTP servers such that they cannot be used by "Spammers" to hijack your server and, consequently, our bandwidth for unauthorized use. Here are a few sites which can help in finding an appropriate SMTP server and how to configure it:

http://mail-abuse.org/tsi/ar-what.html

http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/antirelay/

http://spam.abuse.net/

http://www.abuse.net/

http://samspade.org/

http://ordb.org/

We reserve the right to shutdown VTCRC portals providing Open Relay. We will attempt to get in touch with the appropriate parties before hand if possible. It is in your best interest to provide hostmaster@vtcrc.net with the contact information for the current network laison for your company so such contact attempts can be made. Please request that your network laison obtain and check for accuracy the company "dat" file, request address: hostmaster@vtcrc.net.

NOTE: Many of the companies here at the park are using MS Exchange Server. This server out of the box (V.4.5 and V.5.0), is not very configurable, you'll need to go to the Microsoft website and find security updates for Exchange, and find out how to configure it to prevent "Open Relay" situations. Check the MS site, here are some helpful links there:

http//support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q267/8/56.ASP

http//support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q199/6/56.ASP