Campus rumpus over Hot-Hot-Hotmail

"We are very ticked off," said a spokesman for Warwick University. "We have put the matter in the hands of our lawyers."

The messages typically have obscene subject lines, and contain links to pornographic websites. The sender is given as a user at the warwick.ac.uk domain name, used by the Midlands university.

The messages aren't coming from Warwick staff or students, the spokesman said. They aren't even passing through their computers, nor the infrastructure of JANET, the network used by UK universities.

They have been traced to a US-based ISP, Starnet, the spokesman said. "We contacted them weeks ago, asking what they planned to do about it. Up until yesterday we received no response. The response we have had is inadequate and we are going to pursue the issue in the courts if we have to."

Warwick is one of a list of UK universities to be smeared by spammers. Brighton, Cardiff, Cranfield, East London, Heriot-Watt, Northumbria, Portsmouth, Royal Holloway, Southampton, St Andrew's, Swansea and Westminster universities have all been affected, along with some further education colleges.

The universities have been affected by spammers using a range of US-based ISPs. Most have agreed to close down the accounts used by the junk mail senders, who may rapidly set up new accounts and continue to send out offensive and unsolicited messages.

Hotmail offers software to filter out pornographic mail, but many messages are able to get through. In fact, spammers may have chosen the academic addresses specifically because many Hotmail account holders are students, and spam from ac.uk domains may be more difficult to detect.