To the Campus Community,

We wanted to update you on the status of issues with sending email to certain addresses (the messages will bounce back with a delivery delay or permission denied error).

The short answer: The problem is fixed but will take 2-3 days to propogate fully through the entire internet (world wide).  There should be no more such problems on Monday.

More details: The problem occurred because many email servers do something called a "reverse lookup" to verify that email purporting to come from ColoradoCollege.edu actually is coming from an internet address that is known to be ColoradoCollege.edu's email server.  Anything that seems to be from CC but does not match up with that address is rejected.  When we did the Great Server Migration, the internet address of our email server changed and was thus not recognizable vis a vis this process anymore.

We've been in touch with the necessary folks at Qwest since early this week, and though we had a tough time getting them to perform the update in a timely fashion, we verified that the update was successful yesterday afternoon.

Such an update can unfortunately take 2-3 days to propogate throughout the internet, and there's nothing we can do to hurry that process along.  Starting yesterday afternoon, some of the problem addresses are working again and others are not - they will all gradually start working over the next 2-3 days and should all be set by Monday.  If the problem is persisting for you at that point, please call and let us know.

Before Monday, if you find that you are still unable to send an important email to a certain address, the best workaround is to use an outside email account (such as hotmail, yahoo, msn, gmail, etc.) to send the message.

Also, we are still working on tweaking our packet shaper and firewall to fix the problems with network-based applications (such as iChat, teamspeak, and various online games).  We know it is frustrating not to be able to use these applications, and apologize that it is taking so long to fix -- we are only so many, but are working hard on fixing the issue!

Let us know if you have any questions, and have a terrific weekend!

~ Your Help Desk Staff, x6449, Barnes 212
HelpDesk@ColoradoCollege.edu
8:00 AM to Midnight, Monday - Thursday
8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Friday
3:00 PM to Midnight, Sunday
http://HelpDesk.ColoradoCollege.edu