Oracle Online

First-year David Adair became so annoyed with having his inbox filled that he began deleting any e-mail not from a student or professor.

“It’s easier to just click the box and then hit ‘delete’ than to look through them all,” he explained.

But the problem didn’t arise from students arbitrarily deleting e-mails. Since Hamline allows students to have e-mails forwarded to an alternate address, such as one at Hotmail or Yahoo, e-mails from the 127
Hamline addresses often flooded those addresses instead.

Hamline students using such alternate addresses began reporting student organization newsletters and updates as spam. Since “spamming,” the sending of mass e-mails, usually for commerical purposes, is illegal according to current Internet laws, many servers provide the ability for subscribers to report spam.
These servers, along with watchdog groups, begin monitoring senders that are being reported in large quantities as spammers.

“We were getting reported to SpamCop,” said Kelly Krebs, Hamline's director of student activities and leadership development. SpamCop is a watchdog group that takes spam reports and then compiles a “blacklist” of spammers. Because of a drastic spike in the number of spam reports against Hamline, these all-campus e-mails were blacklisted, meaning that any server working in conjunction with SpamCop would automatically block any e-mail coming from a student organization address. SpamCop told Hamline they had gotten a lot of complaints, so “they threatened to shut down the system,” said Krebs.

Hamline quickly removed its address from this blacklist, and a meeting was held to discuss an alternative to the blanket e-mails. In order to reduce the number of messages sent by addresses with “@hamline.edu” at the end, Hamline began sending all messages to be posted to the Student Announcements page, where all messages are then compiled in to a single e-mail and sent out daily by the Student Center front
desk.

Hamline has since been removed from SpamCop’s blacklist. And Beggs is happy with the change.

“At first I thought it was just another e-mail I didn’t want, but after a while I figured out that it was something
I should be reading,” he said. “The system still isn’t very user-friendly, but it’s definitely an improvement in the sense that I’m not getting so many e-mails.”

Senior Sarah Bailey, a Student Center front desk worker, explained that the e-mails are compiled by whoever is working the front desk at the time the announcement e-mail is sent. For this reason, there are variations in style and form.

“Each person has their own style and their own way of doing things,” she said.

The administration has stated that this is not the final solution to this problem. A meeting has been planned to further address concerns with the current system and to attempt to devise a way to issue student announcements without flooding Hamline students’ inboxes with e-mails.

“It’s a real concern for us, and we’re working hard to do what we can on the issue,” said Krebs.