Leeds practice Shulmans faced a public relations crisis last week after around 1,500 law firms and other organisations received thousands of e-mails that appeared to come from the firm, but in fact did not.


Some - including Shulmans itself - received more than 100,000 copies of the same e-mail, which came from the address 'administrator@shulmans.co.uk'.



The message was a copy of a marketing e-mail that DPS Software originally sent out in February to promote a seminar. However, it has become clear this week that neither Shulmans - which shut down its e-mail server for almost two days after the problem became apparent - nor DPS Software were responsible.



One irate recipient sent a message to everyone else on the list railing against the firm and making it clear that all messages from the firm were now being filtered into junk mail. 'A shame, if they ever want to do e-mail business with us,' he wrote. Others said they have similarly blocked all e-mail coming from Shulmans.



Gazette IT columnist Charles Christian, editor of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter, said that having investigated the matter with the relevant Internet service providers (ISPs), he maintains it was a case of a message being trapped in an accidental e-mail loop, rather than a virus, or deliberate spam.



He said: 'The probable cause was narrowed down to one or more of the recipients on the original DPS e-mail list running a version of Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 containing a bug.'



A patch to resolve the problem can be downloaded from: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=835734.



There are also suggestions that in addition, other servers and some ISPs themselves have been inadvertently duplicating the message, which may have originated at Shulmans. As these have been tracked down and fixed, the flow of e-mails has slowed substantially.



Shulmans managing partner Tim Halstead said he hoped that 'now it's gradually becoming clearer that it wasn't our fault in the first place', the fall-out would begin to decrease. He said it was a 'particular irritation' given that the firm takes every precaution to protect its systems.



He added that Shulmans will contact those firms that it finds are blocking legitimate e-mails it sends.