Junk email and other network abuse

The Unix Systems Group takes electronic junk mail, Usenet spam, and other forms of network abuse seriously. If some of it comes from a user of ours (see what machines we manage), we'll act as fast as we can to put a stop to it. You can report such problems to us at abuse@utcc.utoronto.ca. In order to speed up getting problems stomped, please write directly to abuse and postmaster on the particular machine that's causing problems as well as us.

You can find out the status of current incidents and issues (both inside our group and at the University of Toronto in general) that we know about here.

Our steps against spam

We've taken a number of steps to reduce the amount of junk email and Usenet spam that our users receive. One of the important steps has been to configure our mailer so that it won't relay mail for spammers from outside sources to outside destinations; we urge everyone, especially University of Toronto domains, to do this as soon as possible. We're making the tools and (most of) the data we use to block spam (both email and Usenet) and stop email relaying available here, for use by people at the University of Toronto or who just run the same software as we do.

We are making the reports generated by our Usenet despamming software available here, as part of our general information on our Usenet work.

Of course, we can't promise that our users will never get spam. If you're a user and receive spam, please forward a copy (with as full a set of headers as possible) to our postmaster; if possible, we'll block the source from sending further spam to our users. Because we only keep logs for so long, we probably can't do anything with reports more than about a week old that don't include full headers.

For AGIS (and other spammers)

We and our users do not want to receive unsolicited junk email, unsolicited commercial email, and/or unsolicited bulk email. Do not send it here, to any permutations of our domain and host names, or to any machines that we look after. We explicitly deny authorization to send such mail to our users, or to use our machines to relay such mail to third parties.