I’d like to clarify a few things in regards to Wednesday’s article about Purdue shutting down open e-mail relay. It seems the Exponent writers, as in many cases I’ve seen, have failed to do much research on the subject before they slap it on the front page. E-Mail relaying is occurring when people outside of Purdue’s networks use the mail server to bounce mail off of. The best analogy I can think of is walking by an office and throwing an unstamped piece of mail in their outgoing box. It costs them money and human resources. You know that junk e-mail you get all of the time? It has to get there somehow, right? Well, people who send out junk e-mail (spammers) don’t have the resources available to send that out to a ton of people. Instead, they send the message once to Purdue’s mail server (or any open relay) with 1,000,000+ e-mail recipients. Poor little Purdue’s mail server has to do the legwork to get those messages out. To those who have complained about the speed (or lack there of) of ResNet, this is eating your bandwidth. Tom MacDonald was right when he complained, "… I pay money to go to this school." Up until now, any ole Joe Schmoe wanting to make money off junk mailing (spamming) has been using your precious tuition money. Now, as far as off-campus students who use commercial providers (ie not Purdue DSL), they can still use their e-mail. Purdue’s Webmail still works, but off-campus students who use Outlook/Outlook Express (or a similar e-mail program) simply need to change the "Outgoing Mail/SMTP Server" field in their account settings to be that of their commercial provider. For example, if Verizon were my provider, I would change it from "postoffice.purdue.edu" to "mail.verizon.com." That’s my 300 words.