Rice E-Mail System: E-mail Issues for Off-Campus Users

E-mail Relay

Mail relaying is disabled on Rice computer system because, while it is often legitimate, it is a technique that spammers can take advantage of to easily send spam (unsolicited bulk e-mail) to many people without clogging their own systems. Mail relaying involves one computer contacting an electronic mail hub to request delivery of a message to yet a third computer, rather than contacting that machine directly. Allowing Rice Mail to relay mail gives the appearance that spam originates from the university, giving the university a bad reputation on the Internet.

Currently, as a mechanism to force sites to disable mail relaying, sites like Rice Mail are threatened with having electronic mail traffic "blacklisted." In this process, other computer systems refuse to receive mail from our servers, the mail then silently disappears and is not delivered. To avoid this situation, Rice mail servers simply do not relay mail.

The practical consequence of this policy is that when you send mail using an e-mail client while connected to a non-Rice system or Internet Service Provider, you must change your configuration so that you are not using a Rice server as your SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server. If you attempt to use a Rice SMTP server to send mail, your mail will not be transmitted, and you will receive the error message:

550 We do not relay.

The solution to this is to configure your electronic mail client to use an SMTP, or outgoing mail server, that is appropriate to the location from which you're connecting. A list of common Internet service providers and their SMTP servers follows. If you do not know your mail server and it is not listed below, consult your ISP's documentation or contact their support service.

If you are on the Rice Network or using Webmail to connect to your Rice account, you will not experience any problems with mail relaying.

You do not need to change any settings in order to receive your mail. You can still use the POP or IMAP servers for your mail domain: pop.domain.rice.edu or imap.domain.rice.edu.

More Details

See the FAQ for additional explanations for troubleshooting e-mail relay issues.