Good evening, I am being bombarded with spam and bounce notices for forged emails emanating from the tributaries.org domain which I own. About 80 of these have arrived in the last hour. The likely cause is that someone — who has my email address in their computer's address book, and who is therefore more likely than not subscribed here — has an infected computer which is autogenerating email from forged addresses based on a real one in the address book. For example, I'm getting bounces from such fictional addresses as jcuouenrywosd@tributaries.org. There's no such authorized user in my domain. The infected machine probably has the following entries in its address book: trib@tributaries.org (yrs truly) MSN Groups (at least one of these) PNA (Prayer News Alert) Is this *your* address book, dear reader? If so, you need to disinfect your computer, which is sending a steady stream of outgoing email (and who knows what else — malware? your personal passwords?) from your computer, without your knowledge or approval. In general, anti-virus software, spybot removal software, and other security programs which rely on a "signature file" are only as good as the last time you updated them. Last month's signature file can not and will not detect this week's new virus. I check for security updates at least three times a week, and often daily. If you consider that excessive, please consider yourself warned that Murphy's Law is real, and at a minimum adopt some sort of weekly or regular security update. To all those who are not the culprit, thanks for practicing safe computing. Christopher Brooks, List Administrator: ============================================ BROOKS-NE-L (Brooks Families of New England) at RootsWeb.com ============================================