While IUP has taken a number of steps to decrease spam locally (see http://old.www.iup.edu/tsc/utilities/tuc-spam-announce.shtm), spammers have recently found creative new ways to bypass spam-blocking efforts, causing a significant increase in this junk e-mail.

If you are receiving messages from the same spammers over and over again, it may be possible to block these on your own using the filtering rules in I-mail.  These steps have been outlined at www.iup.edu/techzone/email/blockspam.shtm. 

The link above will take you to the recently-launched TechZone - a collaborative web site developed by Academic Technology Services and the Technology Services Center.  This site addresses questions and problems that are common to anyone with an IUP computing account.  We hope that you will find it to be a useful reference.

These messages are nothing to be concerned about. Basically, there is a machine somewhere that has the virus mentioned in the message you received. When the virus propagated itself from the infected machine, it searched for e-mail addresses on that machine, and it randomly chose one of these addresses and inserted it into the "from" field when sending the message which contained the virus. Your e-mail address was found on was one of those randomly chosen by the machine that is infected.

Furthermore, there are servers out there that check for viruses and notify the "sender" when they are sending viruses. In this case, a message was sent from an infected machine making it look like the message was sent from your e-mail account. The server that was "receiving" the e-mail found a virus in the message, notified the "sender" (which was spoofed -- or faked -- by the virus in the first place) that the message has a virus.

The bottom line is you don't have to worry much about it. However, we do recommend that you keep your home PC (if you have one) updated with the latest virus protection. If you don't have virus protection at home, go to www.iup.edu/tsc/mcafee for a free version with the latest dat files. (Dat file are files that contain up-to-date information about viruses.)

Note: This answer has been updated to reflect the software that was installed with Maintenance Release 1 for Windows XP.

When Maintenance Release 1 was executed on your PC, a new tool called Spybot Search and Destroy was installed also. This product allows you to scan your pc for potential spyware and other programs that might be collecting and disseminating information about you or how you use your PC.

To run Spybot:

1. From the Start Menu, choose IUP Applications, then choose Setup User
2. Select the very last option called "Run Adware/Spyware remover utility", then click OK
3. Click OK, when prompted for the "legal stuff"
4. Spybot will run. You may check the status on the top of the window as it will count up the number of items that it is checking.
5. Once completed, Spybot will give you a confirmation message on how many "problems it fixed". Click OK and Spybot will close.

For more information on Spybot, see www.iup.edu/helpdesk/service/pc/software/spybot/