Mail Relaying Policies

This page is designed to specifically answer questions about Internet Alaska's policies regarding relaying mail through our mail servers. If you are interested in Internet Alaska's general spam policies for mail and news, or a list of blocked spam domains you can find out more about that at http://home.alaska.net/network/spam.cfm.

This page most likely of interest to you if you are getting an error message similar to this when you try to send email to someone who is not an Internet Alaska customer.

Anti-Relaying Error Message

550 larry@domain.com... We do not relay
see http://home.alaska.net/network/spam.cfm - larry@domain.com

Relaying is a term which is used to describe the process of sending mail to a remote server via an intermediate server. If the intermediate server allows you to do this then it is said that "it allows relaying" because it will relay mail from one server to another server, even though its involvement is actually unnecessary (ie. the two servers could talk directly to each other). This used to be common practice as it made everyone's life a little easier, however in todays age of spam (unsolicited commercial email) allowing relaying means that a spammer can use your mail server to send millions of messages out to the net. Most responsible Internet Service Providers are now only allowing their mail servers to relay mail for explicitly stated domains (eg. their customers).

Your next question is most likely to be, "why is this happening to me?". The most common cause of this is if you are one of our customers and you have your mail software setup to send and recieve mail through our servers, however you are not currently getting your network access through Internet Alaska. Because our mail server doesn't recognise the computer's address that you are using as being one of our customers, it denies you.

You can only send mail through our mail servers if you can meet one or more of the requirements below:

• You are connected to the internet via Internet Alaska. This includes being a dialup customer or leased line customer.
  
  
• You are sending email to an Internet Alaska customer (because anyone, anywhere in the world can always send mail to our customers).

There are two possible solutions to the problem:

• We can make an exception for you if, and only if, you are connecting via fixed IP number or a very small range of IP numbers. Examples of this would be if you had a static IP from another internet provider, or if you are trying to use a computer at work or school which has a permenant connection to the internet.
  
  
• If you are an Internet Alaska customer and are connected to the Internet from somewhere other then Internet Alaksa (e.g. UAA, AOL, Netcom etc) then you need to change how your email software is configured. You need to find the SMTP Server setting in your mail software and and change it to point to the SMTP server for the people you are connected through. If you contact technical support for your other provider they should be able to help you make this change (it's very easy).

This should answer the majority of your questions and provide you with useful information. If you think that there has been a mistake or have any questions about this, please feel free to contact us for help at abuse@alaska.net .