[tech] FW: UWA Central Email Gateway service - home stretch.

[Matt Didcoe]

We've discussed this before I know, but given we're dropping our Resnet 
link, will the changes below now effect us?

Matt Didcoe
UCC President / Wheel Member
mattdidcoe at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:42:54 +0800
From: Matt Didcoe <matt.didcoe at uwa.edu.au>
To: "mattman at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au" <mattman at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au>
Subject: FW: UWA Central Email Gateway service - home stretch.

From: tech-contacts-bounces at maillists.uwa.edu.au [tech-contacts-bounces at maillists.uwa.edu.au] On Behalf Of John Ludovico [john.ludovico at uwa.edu.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 16 March 2010 5:58 PM
To: tech-contacts at maillists.uwa.edu.au
Subject: [Tech-contacts] UWA Central Email Gateway service - home stretch.

Good afternoon,

In order to improve the email gateway service  we are in the process of replacing  the aged email gateways with new Ironport devices. These will offer better resiliency, reduce the amount of SPAM received from external sources and increase the reliability of the email service. Equally important will be the ability of this architecture to assist in reducing the blacklists applied to the University caused by compromised mail servers on campus or those utilizing UWA address space.

This project has been running under my supervision for 6 months and during this time, we have spoken with the great majority of email domain owners and migrated an equal number over to the new architecture.

We are now aiming to complete this work by the end of April 2010. We are seeking your assistance to complete the migration to the Ironports and/or to pass on this message to other affected groups that you work with or know of. We have a number of small groups for whom contact details are either outdated and/or do not exist and we are hopeful that this message can act as a catalyst to get the information in front of these people/groups.

A short recap of what we are asking people to do:

For Incoming mail
In order to filter incoming SPAM as per the university email policy, we are using the central core routers to redirect incoming mail through the email gateways. This method has caused problems with network stability.
As part of the project we have been asking that configuration changes at our customer end are focused at directing this incoming mail to the Ironport gateways. This can be achieved by listing them as the primary MX records for the email domain.

For reference, email domains that have been moved over will have MX records that contain:

      IN      MX      10 mail-ext-in1.uwa.edu.au.
      IN      MX      10 mail-ext-in2.uwa.edu.au.

We are asking that owners of any domains that have not been changed should contact ITS Service Desk and ask that an incident be raised and assigned to the ITS Networks team. We will work together with you to effect the changes required to adopt the new gateways.

>From Monday May 3rd, incoming email not directed to the new Ironport gateways will be blocked at the border router.

For Outgoing Mail:
>From a configuration perspective, in order to filter outgoing SPAM as per the University email policy, we are using the central routers to redirect outgoing mail through the email gateways. This method has caused problems with network stability. As part of the improvements promised by the Ironport gateways, ITS will be asking that all outgoing email is explicitly sent to the load balanced service instance, “antivirus.uwa.edu.au”.

NOTE: Currently, outbound messages are policy routed to the internal mail gateway, Panacea ITS. This will be replaced by access lists to prevent any message from being sent directly out the University without being relayed by the Ironports first.

All University email servers will need to be configured to use “antivirus.uwa.edu.au” as their email gateway. Email clients, which don't use their email servers as gateways, should be configured to use “antivirus.uwa.edu.au”. If you have concerns or issues with this configuration change, please contact ITS Service Desk and ask that an incident be raised and assigned to the ITS Networks team.

Again, from 3rd May, outgoing email not sent to “antivirus.uwa.edu.au” will be blocked at the border router and will not leave UWA.

Your assistance in helping us complete this work is appreciated.

John Ludovico
Network & Communications Manager

University of Western Australia
a   m463, 35 stirling highway, crawley wa 6009
w   http://www.uwa.edu.au
p   +61 8 6488 2915
f    +61 8 6488 3861