Engineering Computing -- Rejected Email

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You, of course, are not a spammer. The fact that you're reading this means that you're a real person -- not some mindless, mechanical, mailing machine -- and you'd like to be able to send mail to your friend, colleague, or workmate at UW. And we'd like to help.

Anti-rejection -- a daily key & a special address: This is something you can do right now to send your mail message. Resend your message to the same UserID, but send it to antispam.uwaterloo.ca instead of the original address. Include the anti-rejection key-of-the-day in the Subject: line. Today's anti-rejection key is [an error occurred while processing this directive]. For example, if the address had been something like:     jqsmith@engmail.uwaterloo.ca or     jqsmith@uwaterloo.ca send it to:     jqsmith@antispam.uwaterloo.ca and include [an error occurred while processing this directive] in the Subject: line. To send a message this way now, Click Here, and replace Change-this-UserID and Change-this-Subject.

Getting your site off the list: There are several mechanisms for rejecting mail. The one that rejected yours will have been listed in the rejection message itself. Mail from ... rejected by ORSS -- Open Relay Spam Stopper Mail from ... rejected by RSS -- Relay Spam Stopper Mail from ... rejected by RBL -- Realtime Blackhole List Mail from ... rejected by DUL -- Dialup Users List Show the Mail from ... rejected by message to your site administrator, or send a copy to your internet service provider. Encourage him/her/them to resolve the problems that resulted in the "spammer" designation, so he/she/they can get the site removed from everyone's rejection lists. (If you've had trouble sending to us, you may also find that other places will reject mail from your site.) Visit (and encourage your site administrator to visit) the appropriate website to learn about the problem, its solution, and how to request your site's removal. Note: The databases we use are maintained by the above organizations, not by the University of Waterloo. Users and organizations submit additions to these databases from around the world. Your site's system administrator can request deletions, once the cause of the complaint has been resolved.

FAQ for on-campus users Are you reading my mail? No! The decision to accept or reject a piece of mail is based solely on where it's coming from, and where it's going. We're not checking the contents. How can I get in touch with someone at a blocked site? You can probably send a message to a user at a blocked site without any trouble, but they won't be able to reply. When you send your message (if your userid is jqsmith), specify a Reply-to: field of jqsmith@antispam.uwaterloo.ca and a Subject: line that includes today's anti-rejection key: '[an error occurred while processing this directive]'. The user at the blocked site will be able to reply to your message until this anti-rejection key expires (at midnight tomorrow). Is there something I can do so that all my mail arrives? Individual users in Engineering can request that their mail not be filtered; all mail to their userid could then get through, including any mail (e.g. spam) currently being blocked. I can't believe that XYZ Corporation is a spammer. They may not be; their mail machine may have gotten a bad reputation for some other reason. Let us know if there's a group we should accept mail from, and we'll add it to our exceptions list. (Let us know nicely of course, because we're not a mindless, mechanical, mailing machine either. ) I've got a uwaterloo.ca userid; why can't I send mail from home? If you get the error message "Relaying denied" when sending mail from your computer at home, you're probably trying to relay your outgoing mail through an on-campus machine, rather than through your Internet Service Provider's outgoing mail (SMTP) server. Many on-campus machines will not allow relaying of mail from off-campus sites.