Departmental Email server policy and operations
As a matter of University policy, external email is handled only by a restricted number of registered email servers. This reduces the likelihood of various kinds of abuse, of - or by - servers that are managed at a level which is inadequate to defend against the risks.
The Department mail server is one of these registered servers, and it operates:
1. to receive and send mail for its own users (which now includes particle physics, astro etc.)
2. to relay mail for some local mail servers which do not have their own external access
The Departmental server is therefore the key to our defenses against various kinds of email abuse. It operates, of course, in the legislative framework, and also under rules set down by the campus and, in turn, by the JANET network's acceptable use rules.
Within these rules, the Department agrees policy, and the mail server implements this policy in various ways, as reviewed here.
In the absence of any explicit measures, we can assure users that the volume of spam received would be considerable, and the risk of successful penetration by email viruses would be much increased. The effort which the postmasters put into these defense measures seems to be worthwhile.
Nevertheless, we would advise users to remain vigilant, particularly against virus attack, as there still remains a significant risk of viruses propagating (e.g via writable file shares) within the department if just one lapse allows one of them in.
In particular, users who connect laptops sometimes to an Internet Service Provider, and sometimes to the departmental network, are at significant risk of becoming a "vector" of email viruses if they should acquire them via their ISP. See also the anti-virus briefing, which we try to keep reasonably up to date.