concise and very helpful post many thanks.

I could say something about a lot of help coming from an ex customer, but I won't

I have a PlusNet email about the SPAM deluge but according to my diary I was out and about that day and certainly never used the webmail then. I only use when at the office!

I use AdAware Pro, Spybot S&D and I run ZA freeware behind a hardware firewall.

I intend to install and run BOclean as recommended above as an added layer.

And based on what I have read it seems a good precaution to change my primary account login password which if I understand correctly will be the same as my 'original' default mailbox password.

I like others have had far more spam than usual and in at least one mailbox which has never previously had spam BUT I have had spam in to the default box before this event.

PN really should find a more robust filtering system!!!!!

This is a problem with the way in which the two related problems (Trojans and Spam) have been communicated by PlusNet.

On the one hand people who accessed webmail during a certain period of time (last week, around the 9th of Ma but possibly as far back as the 5th) may have been redirected and had a Trojan downloaded to their system.

On the other is the issue of harvesting of email addresses from the webmail platform. This has hit far more people and email addresses not actually hosted by PlusNet are involved. This is the source of the spam as the list of email addresses has been past onto spammers.

Both problems seem to be related to flaws in the webmail software which had not been noticed or addressed by PlusNet.

This thread is now being linked by Comms staff over on the official forums

A couple of links from there which look useful:

Security terminology and software - petervaughan/csogilvie
Spam FAQ - stewnorris/csogilvie/acarr

Can anyone tell me, is it possible to bounce all this lot back to Plusnet, like one of their email addresses and make them deal with it? Sort of stop using my email and set up something to redirect all the emails to some embarrassing place at PN? We could each pick our own target.

Not unless you basically want to be accused of being a spammer yourself
I can understand your frustrations but any sort of focussed attack unfortunately wouldn't help anyone and is very unethical. Let's not lower ourselves into the area of morals where the spammers and PlusNet dwell.

As posted about briefly here there are two distinct but related problems. Communication of this obviously hasn't been as clear as it could.

I still get a goodly number not marked as spam so use the [email protected] addy as previously (a long time ago) advised.

.... really necessary?

All my scans etc so far have been clear with the exception of what looks like a false positive "Trojan program Trojan-Downloader.Java.Agent.c" detected by Kaspersky AV