[LUGSB] Re: introduction and question

[Charles P. Wright]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 12:31 -0400, Erez Zadok wrote:
> In message <BAY103-F21CD9E0ABA4C0773F3DD5CD2E20 at phx.gbl>, "Aaron Pellman-Isaacs" writes:
> > hmmm... never realized stony filtered 25 (havent used it on campus). Makes 
> > sense I guess though. Do you know if that's a global policy or just 
> > resnet/whatever?
> > --Aaron
> 
> It's a globally applied policy which had been quietly decided and enacted by
> DoIT w/o consultation with the Senate or the campus faculty/IT committee.
> 
> This policy make some sense, in that you want to prevent rogue mail servers
> from being allowed to accept mail -- spammers haven.  But it prevents me
> from delivering email from home directly to my very safe and secure mail
> server at work.  I'm forced to go through optonline's mail server.  I prefer
> to avoid sending sensitive emails as much as possible via unsecure
> networks/servers (don't know what kind of logging/monitoring they might be
> doing).  So until I can setup a secure SMTP server, I have to ssh to my
> workstation and send my mail from there -- not as convenient as doing it
> from a laptop at home.
My personal way to get around this is to use SSH tunnels.  I redirect
local port 1025 on my laptop to a secure mail server that I trust.  This
way I don't need to worry about changing mail settings depending on
where I am, I always send mail through the same mail server.

In my .bash_profile, I have run netcat to check if I have the connection
opened.  If not, then I start ssh with no terminal and port forwarding
using a RSA key.  It works out pretty well for me, and I know that
others use this solution pretty effectively too. 

Chip