The day our 'e-mail' stood for 'excremental mail'.

Publisher's note: Thanks to the many subscribers who alerted us to the recent sabotage of NL/NL's outgoing e-mail. The following is an account of the incident by our webmaster, Jay Muntz, with some lessons to be learned by all.

When I checked my new e-mail messages the other day, I noticed one from The Newsletter on Newsletters alerting me to the headlines of the August 31 issue. This was very odd, considering that no e-mails of this type had ever been sent before and I was not aware of any plans to do so.

Because I serve informally as the webmaster for the NL/NL site (www.newsletterbiz.com), I didn't think such a step would be taken without my knowledge.

Opening the message, I saw that it was clearly a prank. At the bottom of the message was a derogatory comment about NL/NL.

It was also clear to me that all users of newsletterbiz.com who had registered for online access to the Subscribers Only section of the site had received the same message. I assumed that the site had been hacked and immediately tried to track down the intruder.

It turned out that no one had broken into the web server, but somebody did enter the administrative area of the site and sent the message from there. By accessing the web site's log files, I was able to determine that whoever had done this had been on a computer at the Providence, R.I., public library.

I called Jim Marshall to find out if he had any information about the intrusion. He said someone at his office had quit recently and he suspected that person might be responsible.

This person knew the password to the administrative area because part of his job was to keep the site up-to-date. The timing, the circumstances under which this individual left NL/NL, and the fact that the attack had come from the same city as NL/NL's offices all pointed to the same person as the culprit.

The good news is that other than a bit of embarrassment and a few deleted articles from the site, there was no serious damage done.

How to avoid similar sabotage

In sharing this story, I have two goals in mind. One is to inform those who received the offending e-mail what exactly happened.

The other goal is to allow you to learn from our experience. With that in mind, I've come up with a short list of tips to help you prevent similar incidents:

* Just as you would make sure that a former employee doesn't have a key to the office, make sure that all of the passwords that the employee had access to are changed.

* When possible, prevent offsite access to web-based administrative areas and other tools that you use to maintain your web presence. You can often restrict access by IP address, whereby only computers inside your office will have access.

* Choose passwords that are difficult to guess. Trivial passwords that are easy for you to remember can also be remembered or guessed by others.

* Change your passwords regularly. Think about all the different places you need to enter your password (e-mail accounts, voicemail, internet connections, computer workstations, etc.). Try to keep different passwords for each service that you need to access, and change them regularly. If you've been using the same password for several years now, you must get out of this habit.

Having been affected in one way or another by hackers and other pranksters a few times now, I can tell you that it's one of the worst feelings you'll ever have. Common sense and diligence in how you handle your computer systems go a long ways towards making sure you never have to deal with intruders in your computers.

Jay Muntz is Web Site Developer at Application Programming and Development Inc. (APDI), 6805 Coolridge Dr., Camp Springs. MD 20748, 301-449-1400, [e-mail].