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.
BC English professor Denise Mitchell experienced a brief period when BC was blacklisted and sent e-mails to students. Mitchell only receives maybe three to five spam messages a day on her BC account. “The filters BC has in place seem to be doing their job quite well,” said Mitchell.
Due to the test message sent out, it was considered to be spam. Therefore, Yahoo, G-mail and Hotmail blacklisted BC e-mail users. Coston immediately began working to solve the blacklisting problem by working with the companies to get them off the blacklist.
Coston would like students to know it is not a good idea to reply to spam messages. Replying to a spam message only indicates to the spammer that you are actively monitoring your e-mail, which is gold to a spammer. The best choice is to ignore and delete spam messages completely.
In addition to Coston’s message, Palinsky posted a letter to all students on BanWeb explaining how it is not the policy of the KCCD to spam students, or any other group, with unnecessary e-mail, and they sincerely apologize for the trouble it may have caused.