>My cousin is a UCLA student who has Verizon DSL in his apartment.  He 
>wants to use his UCLA email address, but can't using Verizon's SMTP 
>server.  Luckily for him, smtp.ucla.edu is an open relay.  I have 
>confirmed this myself by sending an email through it.  However, because 
>they are a special type of open relay, they don't get blacklisted.  They 
>do a standard relay for "mail from:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>" with one exception: 
>they do a check to see that [EMAIL PROTECTED] actually exists.

all headers are forgeable.

>   I submitted smtp.ucla.edu to one of the open relay databases (I don't 
> remember which one), but it came back negative.  It seems the only 
> @ucla.edu address it tested was [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or something like 
> that), which obviously isn't a real email address.  I imagine this type 
> of open relay is somewhat common.  Why don't the open relay databases 
> attempt to detect it?  Every [EMAIL PROTECTED] address I tried worked 
> so it's not that difficult to fool the smtp server.

iirc, spam checks on our servers did spoof [EMAIL PROTECTED] which we 
blocked (not in relay for addresses).

>   I imagine spammers could easily do s!
>o.  Smtp.ucla.edu being an open relay helps my cousin in this case, but at 
>the expense of possibly allowing spammers to relay.  What do you guys 
>think of this type of SMTP setup?

I think you don't have the whole story, yet.

Len


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