[Questions and responses to this e-mail should be directed to the
BCTC Help Desk -- see below for contact information -- and not by
using the "reply" button on your e-mail account.  That will send your
inquiry to the Wrong Person.]
__________________

To the Campus Community:

This is to alert the campus to a TEMPORARY problem with hotmail
accounts' access to Baruch e-mail users.

Baruch is being "spammed", i.e., receiving a large number of
unsolicited e-mail messages from a variety of hotmail.com email
accounts.  When a college experiences a spam attack, its mail
services and total bandwidth access to the internet can be drastically
affected, as our systems route the high volume of e-mail.  Our mail
servers and internet services have been experiencing significant
problems and may be slower than normal for the next few days.

To address this situation we have found it necessary to block,
temporarily, all mail from hotmail.com.  This may affect student or
faculty correspondence originating from any hotmail account.  We
apologize for any inconvenience this block may cause, but we have
found it necessary to do so in order to ensure that Baruch e-mail
services are able to operate.

We have contacted hotmail to address the problem and we will
remove the block as soon as possible.

There is one step that Baruch e-mail users can take to help us control
the effects of spamming.  If you receive a copy of an unsolicited e-mail,
do not respond or forward the message.  Simply delete the message.

For reference, here is an example of the message that may be
returned to a hotmail sender to Baruch. It will probably be in his or her
hotmail junk folder, which means the sender will probably know that
the attempt to e-mail someone at Baruch has failed.  In the following
example,  xxxxxx replaces the actual email id, and the > indicates this
is a copy.

>Delivery to the following recipients failed.

>       [log in to unmask]
>
>
...
>Reporting-MTA: dns;hotmail.com
>Received-From-MTA: dns;mail.hotmail.com
>Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 09:15:50 -0800
>
>Final-Recipient: rfc822;[log in to unmask]
>Action: failed
>Status: 5.0.0
>Diagnostic-Code: smtp;553 sorry, your envelope sender is in my
badmailfrom list
>(#5.7.1)

Thank you for your patience while we deal with this problem.  If you
have any questions, please contact the BCTC Help Desk at
646-312-1010 or by e-mail at [log in to unmask]