Mail Trouble

[ramseyt]

I have a pb G4, and I use it in several locations. One is at work, where I'm on a wired or wireless connection. At school I'm either plugged in at my dorm, or on wireless somewhere on campus. Here is the problem. We just got our stats back from our IP and the "Top External Email Senders" are listed. I am number one on the list on my school IP. Here is the descriptions of what a "Top External Email Sender" is.
"This section identifies users outside your firewall who are sending the most e-mail and how much data they are sending. You can use the graph to identify peak days in e-mail traffic by sender._ This table may allow you to spot spammers and take action to protect your email resources."

The problem is, my computer is taking up almost 40 percent of the bandwith doing this. It sent out over 10,000 e-mails last month.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on what the problem is, and how to correct it. Thanks.

Also, sendmail is not on. All sharing is kept off, and the firewall kept on. Thanks

 

[evildan]

Well, and this is just a guess, but it seems like the stat you are referring to is not at the computer level at all. It sounds like it's at the account level.

Meaning, that stat is not the amount of email on your powerbook, but perhaps a collective number from the emails that you send and those from others possibly using your account.

The other question I have is what kind of network is this? Are you assigned a static IP address from a wireless hub? That typically doesn't make much sense. Most large networks are set up with dynamically assigned IP addresses (DHCP).

On a DHCP network you are leased an IP address for an alloted amount of time.

Take a look at your IP address next time your at school.. is it something like this 10.0.0.X where X is some number between 1 and 255? or is your IP something like this. 123.123.123.123 where the 123's are a number between 1 and 255.

If your on a DHPC server, then their "statistic" may be pooling you in with more of your fellow students.

If your IP is static (never changes) -- which would be kind of scary, then you could have someone spoofing your IP at the university.

Either way, if you feel this number is wrong, contact your University IT Administrator. I'm sure he/she would be interested in knowing this.

[edit]

Also, you don't need to go to school to find out if your on a DHCP server, you can just check the settings from your powerbook. (OSX I'm assuming) Launch your System Prefrences and click on "Network". Then click on the settings you're using for your school account. You might have a location named "school" or the name of the University you go to.

If you see "Configure Manually" then you have a static IP address. Contact your University IT guy and tell him/her that they shouldn't be handing out static ip addresses to students, they're asking for trouble.

If you see "Configure using DHCP" then we're back to the uselessness of a stat that is IP based when it is a great possibility that other students will share your IP address when you're not using it. (Since your computer also lives off campus).