Enterprise Information Technology Services Press Release
The University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia

OCIO > EITS > Press Releases

Thursday, August 7, 2008

WRITER: Bert DeSimone,706-338-9849, bert@uga.edu
CONTACT: EITS Help Desk,706-542-3106, helpdesk@uga.edu

UGAMail Webmail message sending limits combat spammers, potential user impact

ATHENS, Ga.— After significant testing and assessment of potential user impact, EITS will be implementing message sending limits on UGAMail Webmail. These limits are being implemented to combat spammers using compromised UGAMail accounts, who often use the Webmail method of sending email as the conduit for spamming.

This change only affects users of the Webmail interface to UGAMail as accessed via ugamail.uga.edu. Users of Outlook, Thunderbird, and other email programs are not affected. Administrative applications which send email are not affected.

The implementation date for these limits is Tuesday, August 12.

When the message limits are exceeded, the error message will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the screen (see circled area).

Webmail users who exceed these limits will receive an error message, as shown in the screen image above. The new message limits are as follows:

Maximum Number of Recipients per Single Message: 50
The maximum number of recipients for a single Webmail message. If this setting is exceeded, the sender receives the error message Send: Too many recipients in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and remains on the Send screen. Nothing is copied to the Sent folder. If sending from a distribution list from the addressbook, this counts as one user (spammers do not send as if from a distribution list).

Maximum Number of Messages per Hour: 50
The maximum number of messages that can be sent from a single account in an hour. If this setting is exceeded, the sender receives the error message Send: This account is over its mail-sent quota. Contact your administrator. in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and remains on the Send screen. Nothing is copied to the Sent folder.

Maximum Recipients in one Hour: 400
The maximum total number of recipients a single account can send to in an hour. For example, 20 messages to 20 recipients each. If this setting is exceeded, the sender receives the error message Send: This account is over its mail-sent quota. Contact your administrator. in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and remains on the Send screen. Nothing is copied to the Sent folder.

In all cases, "recipients" include the total of To: CC: and BCC: addresses.

For more information, or if you have questions, please contact the EITS Help Desk using the contact information included at the top of this release.

About the Office of the CIO and EITS
The Office of the Chief Information Officer and Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) are committed to the mission of UGA as a land-and-sea-grant institution where academics come first and the research extensive university community encourages research efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. To that end, under the direction of the University´s Chief Information Officer, EITS endeavors to provide a robust, reliable, and secure information technology infrastructure, maintain essential production services, and offer world-class support.