Recently, emails have been bouncing back as undeliverable to the www.goldfishsociety.org domain. Some of these emails appear to have virus payload files attached. This tells us that someone is sending out infected emails and trying to pretend they are us.
The GFSA sends out no unsolicited emails. Nada, none, zilch. And we certainly don't mass email viruses. We are encountering the problem that every Internet domain owner experiences; someone is using our domain in the "from" field of their emails, as they mass mail out virus files.
These emails do not come from the GFSA and we have no control over them, unfortunately. This is called "spoofing", where someone tries to trick you into accepting and opening an email with a harmful attachment, by making it look like it comes from a source you might trust. Unfortunately, the email protocols used on the Internet today offer no way to stop this. The bad effect, for the GFSA, is that some ISPs may begin to filter out emails from "www.goldfishsociety.org" as coming from a junk mail source. At that point, the spoofers will have moved on to others' domains, but the damage is done to us.
Webmaster editorial comments (the following is personal opinion): solutions to this and general issues of mass emailed junk mail have existed for 15 years, and center around no longer allowing people to send email essentially anonymously. The industry and the Internet RFC process have been trying to balance the need for Internet freedom versus the need to control unwanted and malicious email. I think this will take too long, without some strong external force to drive a common need for consensus. Write your elected representatives, tell them you are sick of this.