Thousands of students were spammed recently (ironic isn't it) with the news that they would no longer be able to send e-mail from their homes through normal means because of so-called issues with spam. Interestingly enough, Feb. 9, 1998, exactly four years prior to the recent cut-off date, Purdue University adopted a no-relay policy and has not been an open relay since that date. So why is it that we have undergone these recent changes in policy? The cover-up: Paul Vixie, the founder of the Realtime Blackhole List, used by every large ISP to blackhole all known spam mail, basically deleting the e-mail upon retrieval, before causing this so-called huge denial of service attack, as stated in the e-mail (I think our IT department needs to read up on what a denial of service attack really is). Also let me quote the IT department once more regarding their sense of urgency with this matter, "It will be like taking out a national ad that says: 'We are not proactive in managing our networks or computer systems at Purdue University.'"

I believe their ResNet policies have shown this, but now they have really shown how "proactive" they can be at removing yet another privilege. So the question remains as to why they have gone ahead with such drastic and inappropriate response to the situation (besides Jischke's shotgun administrative approach to student issues). The answer is simple, "resources." We at Purdue have once again reached our limits with the current hardware for our mail servers. Four years ago, Purdue reached the limit and dropped the open relay for the rest of the Internet. Now they will go as far as to effectively cut off the majority of Purdue's campus from mail servers.