Email Off the Stanford Network
Overview
If you're traveling with your laptop or computing at home through an ISP you expect to use email. Usually, receiving email is no problem. But sending mail is a different story. Spammers may be able to exploit Stanford's smtp-remote server -- the one you employ for sending email while off campus -- to route junk mail across the Internet. As a consequence, any email you send from off-campus to someone else off-campus may be considered spam: your email can get bounced or denied.
Two Options
There are two ways to deal with this. The first and easiest is to use Webmail. The second is to reconfigure your email program so it uses a special outgoing server created especially for people sending email from off-campus:
- Webmail
This lets you check and send mail from any computer that can access the Web. - Make
a few changes in your email program
Stanford created a new SMTP server, called smtp-roam.stanford.edu, for people who take their computers on and off the network. This new SMTP server is secure: it can only be accessed via SUNet ID authentication. This prevents spammers, or anyone not affiliated with Stanford, from sending junk mail through Stanford's outgoing email servers. In addition, this server works both on and off-campus, so once you change to this server you don't have to change back.
