IT Professionals:
On Tuesday, August 1, Indiana University will require that any accounts sending authenticated emails through the IU SMTP host, mail-relay.iu.edu, must submit an authorization request for access.
Who is impacted? The biggest impact may be to IU systems that use mail-relay.iu.edu as their outgoing SMTP server. Some account owners may have also configured email clients to send outgoing emails through the system, such as Apple’s Mail application, Thunderbird, or other desktop or mobile applications.
UITS will pre-authorize group accounts that have authenticated to the system in the previous 90 days. All hosts that currently have SMTP authentication exemptions will be automatically authorized, as well.
A direct communication will be sent next week to the accounts that have authenticated to the system this year.
Why the change? Currently, all active IU accounts are authorized by default, but many of these accounts have no need to send emails through mail-relay.iu.edu, as most account owners send emails directly from Exchange. Malicious actors have used the credentials of compromised IU accounts to send emails from mail-relay.iu.edu. To increase the integrity of IU email, only those accounts needing to send emails will be permitted after submitting a request for authorization.
How is authorization requested? Account owners may submit an authorization request via a Fireform accessible from the KB Request SMTP authentication authorization for mail-relay.iu.edu. They may submit authorization requests for their own account, any group accounts they own, as well as any on-campus host exemptions for systems that need to send to external recipients that do not support SMTP AUTH.
What is not affected?
- Emails sent from on-campus systems to IU recipients will not be affected, as these emails do not leave the IU network and thus do not require authentication. This includes emails sent from on-campus IP addresses, and computers/servers hosted on campus such as in the IU Data Center, that send email reports or alerts to an IU email address.
- Exchange users will not be affected, whether they are sending to internal or external clients. However, other email clients that connect via IMAP+SMTP protocols may need authorization.
For questions, please contact Tier 2 Support at sct2@iu.edu.
–IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Indiana University Email Administrators
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