Everyone currently or will eventually receive emails with a colleagues return address on it which contains information that they would have never sent, such as a pornography website. Perhaps someone has contacted you regarding an email that appears to have come from you which contains this type of material. You know you didn't send it, and your colleagues claim that they didn't have knowledge of this questionable-content email. Why is this happening? What's is the cause of this? What is NSU doing to curtail this activity from my campus email? What about protecting my email 'dignity' at home?

These questions are all too common these days, and there is no easy answer. Michael Gibbons, Director of Computing and Telecommunications responds this way:

"I understand that an incident like this can be very distressing. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done. ... the most likely explanation is a Mass Mailer (MM) virus. Simply put, a MM virus will forward messages to everyone in the victims address book and spoof or hide where the message came from, by changing the 'From' name. NSU computers are generally very well protected from this type of virus and it is very likely that you are in the address book of some one outside the University who got infected with the virus.
We can and do protect NSU computers from being infected by these viruses, but there is little we can do about any computer we do not control.
... I realize that this probably doesn't do a lot to lessen (someone's) embarrassment or the damage (they) feel has been done to (their) reputation, but the problem is with the Internet at large and not with the University."

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