The University is increasingly concerned about
the security of our computing services, and as such is moving vulnerable services behind the University firewall or simply shutting them down altogether.

With the closure of staffmail and everyone now using Office 365, our
authenticated smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk service is a service with relatively little use, is world accessible, and under constant attack from the outside.

From the 2 months of logs that we keep, there are only 46 users
(myself included) of the service. Of those 46, 13 only ever connect
from IP addresses within the University network (including the VPN),
13 people only ever connect from outside of the University, and the
rest connect from both.

Given this, and the fact that Office 365 already offers an
authenticated SMTP service – outlook.office365.com port 587, we will
move smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk to behind the University’s firewall. With
a view to closing the service altogether at some point after that.

We will remove world access to smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk on Wednesday the 15 of June 2022. If you are an smtp.inf user, during that time you should
switch to using outlook.office365.com for your outgoing mail, or be
prepared to use either the University’s or Informatics VPN
(https://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/vpn) to continue connecting.

Changes to smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk / Computing Systems by is licensed under a