During finals weekend, some students who used Outlook Express to check their Brandeis email received a message reporting that, due to criminal activity, their mail has been temporarily delayed. The message assured them that no real e-mails were harmed."Starting at 16:42:09, a person in Sachar began using two computers to send unsolicited, bulk e-mail to millions of e-mail addresses to promote their business venture," Brandeis Chief Network Administrator Richard Graves wrote on MyBrandeis in response to a student's question.

"Many messages were sent 'direct-to-mx.' Messages that could not be delivered immediately were relayed through imap.undergrad.brandeis.edu. They had previously attempted to use smtp.unet, but spam controls there blocked them. They were using a spam tool with the trivially recognized 'friend@public.com' signature," wrote Graves.

The name comes from the DNS records that are used for e-mail delivery. E-mail servers require MX, or Mail eXchanger records, in the Domain Name System. Direct to MX SpamWare looks up the MX records for a person's mail server just like a normal mail server would, and delivers it directly.

"Deletion of the 250,000 or so queued spam messages (without disturbing the 5,000+ legitimate messages to undergrads that were also being queued under load) and initial response to spam complaints took until 3 a.m. Then further investigation found the specific user responsible, who has acknowledged their involvement," wrote Graves. The person has not been identified.

Graves does not believe that any "legitimate emails were lost as a result of this abuse."