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Hey, who’s hijacking my mail? They sent it; I didn’t get it by George Spain CCIT Technical Publisher You’ve been waiting for this e-mail for two days. It has what you need to complete a project. You know your colleague sent it. You know she had the right address. So where is this important message? Later, you get a call from your colleague saying she got a cryptic message like, “Sorry, your mail server (128.23.nnn.nn) is rejected by dnsbl.njabl.org. See http://njabl.org and contact your ISP.” Or, maybe the sender doesn’t see any error message at all. You didn’t get your important e-mail and she doesn’t have a clue why not. This affects all e-mail systems on campus, IMAP and GroupWise users.  What’s going on? Your colleague’s mail server is being blacklisted. Remember, it’s not your colleague, just her Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) mail system. MUSC subscribes to a service called NJABL.ORG. This service maintains a list of thousands and thousands of mail systems that, for one reason or another, can’t be trusted to protect you from SPAM, nasty or nice. This is how the blacklist works: Your colleague’s mail arrives at MUSC. Its headers, which contain the address of your colleague’s mail system, are reviewed or “sniffed.”  If the header contains an address that appears on the NJABL.ORG blacklist, our system rejects it and a message is sent back to your colleague (like the, “Sorry, your mail server…” note above). Some e-mail programs hide this kind of error message from the sender, so the sender never knows there’s a problem. What’s the problem? According to Mike Coffman, an administrator with CCIT’s Infrastructure Services, the problem can be summed up in three words, “Spam, Spam, Spam.” Since the service went into effect, we’ve been blocking an average of 18,000 messages a week. “We got many requests to filter out junk mail like pornography, life insurance, and other commercial junk. Also, the flood of spam was affecting the mail servers’ delivery of legitimate mail,” said Coffman. Paul Arrington, an e-mail systems administrator, added, “The high volume of un-returnable spam...will sit in the mail server’s mail queue for a week trying to get to its destination meanwhile hogging mail resources.” He said he expects the NJABL.ORG service will lessen the burden on the mail server and improve delivery speed. “We expected a few bumps in the beginning, but eventually, things will even out.” So what can I do? There are a few things you can do to help e-mail along:  First, realize not all unreceived mail problems are related to the blacklist.  If you know the e-mail address of the person trying to send mail to you, the CCIT Help Desk at 792-9700 can check the NJABL.ORG list.  If the address does not appear, then you know it’s not being blocked and something else is wrong. CCIT can help work through the problem.  If a blacklist problem is identified, call your colleague and tell her what’s happening. It will be up to her to rant at her e-mail administrator to get off the blacklist by closing loopholes in their mail system. After all, MUSC is not the only organization to adopt a blacklist strategy; therefore, if we’re blocking her mail, others may be too.  Second, administrators can, in an emergency, “whitelist” either a single user or an entire domain so that mail will not be blocked. This is only done after an MUSC mail recipient requests it and the sender’s ISP won’t take any action. To date, only 26 servers have been “whitelisted,” said Arrington.  You can request a “whitelist” by calling the CCIT Help Desk, which will contact the appropriate administration team to work out a solution to your blocked mail problem. Both Coffman and Arrington warn that NJABL is not the problem, the spammers are. MUSC itself was once on the blacklist, but got off when it took the steps necessary to close loopholes spammers could exploit. So can other ISPs. It’s really up to your colleague to raise cain with her ISP to close the holes.         Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.