BC against receiving unsolicited commercial e-mails
After using the Barracuda spam blocker, the Kern Community College District was still struck by more than 1.2 million spam messages.
Elizabeth Meeks
Issue date: 12/3/08 Section: Campus
Anyone who has an e-mail address and accesses it regularly has probably been the victim of spam mail, and Bakersfield College isn't immune to the problem.
David Palinsky, BC director of Information Technology, sent out an e-mail informing BC faculty about how much spam was being sent to the Kern Community College District. Even with preventive measures being used, such as the Barracuda spam blocker, KCCD was still getting hit with more than 1.2 million spam messages a day.
Spam is described as unsolicited commercial e-mail or a flooding of the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.
Students who have a BC e-mail address have usually been protected against receiving spam messages due to the technology department at the KCCD until recently.
The KCCD conducted a survey for Institutional Research, and, to make the survey easy to send out, a temporary listserv with all of the student e-mail addresses was devised. According to an e-mail sent by Systems Manager Todd Coston, the Information Technology department sent a test message to the list. Unfortunately, they accidentally sent an e-mail to the list after they had already populated the list with student e-mail addresses. The problem was compounded when several students replied back to the list thus generating more messages to all of the students on the list.
Some students were affected while others were not.
Student Michaela Ruth, 19, was one of the students who received the test message and did not take much notice to the e-mail. "I received between five and seven messages and was mostly confused by it, but I was too busy to care," said Ruth.
BC student Jill Candia, who works in Records and Administration, also received the messages but did not open it. Candia also uses Yahoo as an e-mail address and found when she tried to reach her professors via Yahoo she did not get a response from her professor, which she normally does.
David Palinsky, BC director of Information Technology, sent out an e-mail informing BC faculty about how much spam was being sent to the Kern Community College District. Even with preventive measures being used, such as the Barracuda spam blocker, KCCD was still getting hit with more than 1.2 million spam messages a day.
Spam is described as unsolicited commercial e-mail or a flooding of the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.
Students who have a BC e-mail address have usually been protected against receiving spam messages due to the technology department at the KCCD until recently.
The KCCD conducted a survey for Institutional Research, and, to make the survey easy to send out, a temporary listserv with all of the student e-mail addresses was devised. According to an e-mail sent by Systems Manager Todd Coston, the Information Technology department sent a test message to the list. Unfortunately, they accidentally sent an e-mail to the list after they had already populated the list with student e-mail addresses. The problem was compounded when several students replied back to the list thus generating more messages to all of the students on the list.
Some students were affected while others were not.
Student Michaela Ruth, 19, was one of the students who received the test message and did not take much notice to the e-mail. "I received between five and seven messages and was mostly confused by it, but I was too busy to care," said Ruth.
BC student Jill Candia, who works in Records and Administration, also received the messages but did not open it. Candia also uses Yahoo as an e-mail address and found when she tried to reach her professors via Yahoo she did not get a response from her professor, which she normally does.
Be the first to comment on this story