Many of you have reported large amounts of email flooding your inbox, in many cases reporting that you are receiving returned messages that did not originate from your account. We are taking steps to reduce and in some cases eliminate this type of email nuisance.

In the past year there have been an increasing number of email worms and viruses reported that use what is known as email address 'spoofing' to disguise the address used by an infected computer to send out several emails in an attempt to propagate the virus or email worm.

If you are receiving a high number of postmaster returned massages, or messages with a subject of 'Undeliverable', check the body of the messages. If the body of the message is something you are not familiar with, or was not sent from your account, then your email address is probably being 'spoofed'. This does NOT mean that your computer is infected by a virus or email worm. It MAY indicate that another computer, that IS infected, is using your email address as the return address on email messages that are being sent out in an attempt to propagate a virus or email worm.

Think of it in terms of normal postal service procedures. If someone were to send out 100 postcards to random addresses, and on each of the cards, they wrote your return address. Cards sent to valid addresses would be delivered fine. The recipients may look at the return address and wonder who you are and why you sent them the card. Other addresses may be invalid for one reason or another. In this situation, the card will not be delivered, but the postal service will return the card to the return address listed on the card. Since the person writing out the postcards used your address as the return address, you would receive the undeliverable postcards.

In an attempt to reduce the likelihood of this method being able to succeed we are going to be making some changes to the SMTP servers for all accounts. Before the end of the 2002 calendar year, ALL of our SMTP servers will require authentication.

Not sure what that means? Well, we have taken some screenshots to help those of you that are unsure exactly how to go about setting your email client to use SMTP authentication. The screenshots that we took were taken using Outlook 2002.