Students and staff at the University of Western Sydney were hit with a "deluge of junk email" this week after a student appeared to protest against the idea of the university spending $35 million on 13,000 iPads for new students and other IT initiatives.

Starting on Sunday night, hundreds of emails began pouring into student inboxes alerting them that they had been signed up to a number of website's newsletters, many of which appeared to have an LGBT agenda.

ipad

To make matters worse, a number of people hit "reply all" to them to say they didn't want to be subscribed, which only exacerbated the problem, taking the 250-odd spam messages up to two or three thousand.

A statement from the university's media department earlier this week to Fairfax Media's Sun newspaper in Parramatta confirmed the university's email distribution lists had been "breached".