• You may not use the service to send "SPAM" mail (unsolicited advertisements sent by email or cross-posted to multiple newsgroups). You may not use a his.com mailbox as a contact point for SPAM mail sent on this or any other system, and you may not use SPAM to advertise a web site that uses a HIS-hosted domain.
• Host computers connected to the HIS network may not be configured so as to allow relaying of mail from unaffiliated systems to the internet (i.e., you may not operate an open SPAM relay).

UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email, also known as "SPAM") has become a tremendous problem on the internet. Most people who've been on the net for any period of time (sometimes only a day or two) have received email advertisements for golf balls, investment scams sex web sites, or causes of various kinds.

SPAM is different than postal 'junkmail' - unlike regular postal mail, email costs the sender nothing beyond the basic cost of a dialup internet account, so it has become a very popular medium for advertising products and causes of all types.

SPAM isn't just annoying - it uses a large percentage of the internet resources (backbone bandwidth, host processing, support staff time) that providers and their customers pay for. At times, the volume of SPAM that attempts to come in to our mail servers exceeds the volume of real email!

We implement the following anti-SPAM measures at the system level:

• email from individual email addresses known to transmit SPAM is banned.
• HIS mail servers reject mail from hosts listed in the following realtime SPAM databases:
  • Realtime Blackhole List
  • Relay Spam Stopper List
  • Open Relay Behaviour Modification System

• incoming email must come from domains that accept reply email. If a domain does not exist, or it exists but reply mail is deactivated (in technical terms, their DNS entry has no "MX" record), we will reject the mail. (Note: this means that if you have modified your return address so that a reply message won't get back to you, such as joe@his.remove-this-to-reply.com, your mail will be rejected, and you'll get an alert that suggests that you check your configuration).
• incoming mail that comes from hosts outside our network will be accepted if the addressee is on our network (has a his.com/hers.com address, or uses a domain that HIS hosts (i.e., is a HIS customer), but will be rejected if the destination addresss is outside of our network.
  • If you have a popmail account on one of our servers, you can still use that server to send email from the office or while connected through another ISP, as long as you check your popmail box for new mail at least once before sending email.
  • Note: a good way to use mail.his.com while at work or on the road is to use our web interface at http://webmail.his.com. You can also telnet/SSH to mail.his.com, logging on with your HIS username and password. This will bring up pine automatically, which you can use to send/receive email and read newsgroups.