Pro-BNP spam hits NHS inboxes

The e-mail, entitled “An Open Letter to NHS Staff”, was copied from the BNP website and sent over the bank holiday weekend from an open mail relay outside NHSNet. It said that “overwhelming demand by asylum seekers and illegal immigrants have turned the services into what many sarcastically refer to as the WHS – the ‘World Health Service’".

The headers and routing had been faked so it appeared to come from gmas.nhsdirect.nhs.uk; the Greater Manchester Ambulance Service and NHS Direct. The name of the sender was “Concerned Friend".

According to a report in the Guardian newspaper, the email only came to the attention of senior officials when it arrived in the inbox of an NHS trust director.

The NHSIA said that they were currently looking into how internal NHS e-mail addresses came to be on the spammer’s mailing list and how many people the e-mail was sent to. They confirmed that the e-mail did not originate from Greater Manchester Ambulance Service or from NHS Direct.

“All NHS organisations sign a code of connection or acceptable usage agreement when joining. Individuals within these organisations are bound by an IT usage agreement,” said the NHSIA. “This includes not spreading hate messages."

“People who have received the messages are being told that it is a bogus email and are being advised to ignore and delete the message."

Dr Phil Edwards, national press officer for the BNP, told E-Health Insider that the party had not been involved in sending the letter to NHS staff: “It was an open letter published on our website. Anybody in the world could have copied it and sent it out. I’ve no idea who was responsible."

Syntegra, who handles the NHS e-mail service, has taken steps to block the message and the IP address it was sent from, and is assisting in the investigation into the spam’s origin.