A spokesman said the University is angered by the spam which looks like it comes from an e-mail account @warwick.ac.uk, the University’s domain name. He explained that the unsolicited e-mails are not passing through the university’s system so they are not coming from students or staff. They traced the e-mails to an ISP called Starnet in the US but requests to the ISP to block the spammers went unanswered for several weeks.
News site TheRegister.co.uk reports the University as saying that any court action would be “about the defamatory nature of the spam – bringing the reputation of the establishment into disrepute.”
Disguising the source of e-mail in this way is a form of “spoofing”. Other UK universities have been the victims of spoofing spam, apparently because recipient systems tend not to filter the content of e-mails coming from .ac.uk domains.