America Online refused e-mail from Tufts accounts for 24 hours last week, thanks to an early semester surge in outgoing spam messages.
America Online (AOL) alerted the University at 11 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 22.
"They were not accepting mail from Tufts because they felt Tufts was sending them too much spam," Lesley Tolman, the director of the University's information technology infrastructure, said.
During the 24-hour block, Tolman said, e-mail from Tufts accounts was temporarily queued. The messages were re-sent once the block was lifted.
Tens of thousands of e-mails were sent to AOL from the Tufts server, AOL spokesperson Nicholas Graham said.
According to Tolman, students return at the beginning of each semester with various viruses on their computers that automatically send spam e-mails from the Tufts server.
"While many students bring their infected machines to Tufts Online to be cleaned, not all do," she said.
AOL has what it calls a white list - "accredited and known centers of legitimate bulk email," Graham said.
Tufts is not currently on the AOL list, so the company received many spam e-mail reports. "A number of people were pressing the report spam button," he said.
"Because Tufts was not on the white list," Graham said, "we could not tackle the problem as quickly as we would have liked."
Tolman said there is a spam quota that triggers the e-mail block, and that AOL has used the block on the Tufts server before. "AOL has established a threshold for complaints," she said. "It's highly likely that the mail that pushed the threshold this time was spam."
Tufts is now in the process of being added to the AOL white list to avoid future problems.
