Mail sent to pilot.msu.edu addresses will bounce beginning May 10, 2006.
In mid 2003 mail.msu.edu became MSU's central e-mail system, replacing
the Pilot e-mail service. Since then, mail sent to addresses such as
[log in to unmask] has been delivered as if sent to
[log in to unmask] As of May 10, 2006, mail sent to Pilot addresses
will bounce, with a notice back to the sender that the mail is
undeliverable.
We are taking this action because a number of users have complained
that mail to their old Pilot addresses is virtually always spam.
Continued delivery of mail to @pilot.msu.edu addresses adds to the
burden of unsolicited mail, it also adds significant processing load
for mail.msu.edu servers.
We believe that this change will cause minimal impact on delivery of
legitimate mail, while substantially reducing spam deliveries at MSU.
For several years, ACNS has encouraged members of the MSU community
to use addresses of the form [log in to unmask] Pilot's replacement,
mail.msu.edu, has been in production almost three years, affording
ample opporunity for updating address information.
The ACNS mail team plans to send explanatory bounce messages for mail
sent to pilot.msu.edu for a period of at least 30 days -- perhaps up
to 60 or 90 days. At last Friday's NAG meeting, attendees seemed to
think 30 days was sufficient. If you believe we should bounce
messages for a longer interval, please let us know. After the
interval, the host name pilot.msu.edu will be removed from the DNS,
and mail addressed to Pilot will be bounced by the sender's mail agent
as "host unknown."
Please urge your end users to check their mailing list (e.g.
"Listserv") subscriptions, and to communicate with their key
correspondents to ensure that senders' address books use addresses of
the form johndoe@msu.edu..
We also urge MSU units to check Web pages and other documents to be
sure that references to pilot.msu.edu are eliminated. A Google search
finds 229,000 such references on the Web globally, and over 50,000
within msu.edu. (A few of these are pages that we need to update
ourselves.) To find Web references to pilot.msu.edu, please do a
search of this form, substituting your own domain for "site:msu.edu":
"pilot.msu.edu" site:msu.edu
We will post an article detailing this change in Techbase, MSU's
computing knowledge base, shortly.
Thanks,
/rich
