In recent months I, probably along with many of you, received e-mail from an MX server informing me that the e-mail message I sent to someone (someone I did not know) contained a virus. In some cases the helpful mail server bounced the infected attachment back to me. And in all cases, the errors were in response to e-mail claiming to be from me, but not from me.

Brian Martin of Attrrition.org discusses this and makes the charge that these anti-virus companies are commiting spam. His interesting discussion is at attrition.org. There is only one statement in this article I must protest against (see if you can guess), but found the discussion compelling. At the very least we should carefully consider how we set up our mail gateway antivirus systems.