Mail

We are working on replacing our incoming mailservers and something went wrong. Due to an unexpected block in the mail flow, around 2800 mails which were queued from around 18:00 on Feb 2nd, were lost. The host queuing the mail, was replaced on Feb 3rd, around 8:30 and decommissioned at around 9:00. Unfortunately, the decommissioning also destroyed the disk of the server with the mail queue of around 2800 e-mails. At 18:00 on Feb 2nd, two servers were accepting incoming mail, but only one of the servers was queuing, the other one was running as expected. ...

The Science mailservice used Spamhaus for decades as one of the blocklists to filter spam in mail. When we were notified that we would need a commercial license that would cost ca. 5kEUR/y, we investigated how much more spam would come through without the Spamhaus service. This showed that users would get more spam, but most of it would be delivered in the Spam folder. Next to that, we expect that the spam filtering of the also used Exchange Online Protection will improve. ...

Last friday, a change in the mailman configuration has been rolled out which had the inadvertent effect that mails were not delivered to external addresses anymore. However, these mailman posts were sent successfully to internal Science mail addresses. The change has been rolled back for the moment but is a necessity meaning that we’re looking for another solution.

The last few days three Science users have supplied their Science password to phishers. We notice that because Internet criminals use these passwords to get into the Science mail servers (horde webmail, smtp) in order to send spam. This time they even used a fake copy of the horde Science webmail website. The big differences with the real horde Science webmail website are: the URL is not within science.ru.nl the connection is not a secure https connection, there is no lock the username and password do not arrive at C&CZ servers, but in the hands of Internet criminals. PLEASE: do not naively click on a link in an e-mail!

Horde webmail again appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to phishers/spammers. After first stopping horde, early Friday morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde. Saturday morning it appeared that this short spam-outbreak had caused administrators of hotmail.com to add our mail server to their blacklist. Therefore we switched the IP-number of this mail server Saturday morning.