Q. Why am I getting email bounced back to me when I did not send it in the first place?

The messages are not being sent out of your account. What is happening is that somebody you know, or a mailing list you are on, has a PC infected with a virus. The virus goes through that person's address book and web cache and picks out addresses at random which it uses for both the "to" and the "from" when it replicates itself. Unfortunately there is no way to protect your email address from being forged in this way. The mail never actually passes through our system, except in these cases where it goes to an unknown user and is bounced back to the supposed sender.

Unfortunately there is not way to protect yourself against this when your email address appears in someone else's address book. You can however protect your web pages from giving up your mail address to either a spam address collector or virus code. See the FAQ at http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/facilities/FAQ/WebAvoidMailto.html for details.