Royal Purple

Issue date: 2/20/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Nou Thao Students recieve dozens of spam e-mails a day in their university e-mail inboxes.

Throughout the week students login to their campus e-mail to contact professors or classmates, but they also find their inbox filled with spam e-mail and announcements from the university.

"I think we have a problem," junior Gretchen Yeo said. "I have 75 pages of spam e-mail, and it makes it difficult to find things from professors."

Yeo said she has even been getting e-mails from herself.

Many students feel some of content in the spam e-mails is inappropriate.

"There seriously needs to be a spam filter for the university because I'm tired of getting e-mails asking me how big my penis is," senior Anthony Frederick said.

What some students might not realize is that the university does have a spam filter that has not been working at the same rate as spammers.

"The spammers are always finding new ways to get past the technology," said Mary Jo DeMeza, director of instructional, communication and information technology. "So the people that are working to stop the spamming are always playing catch up."

DeMeza said spam is a problem throughout the world and about 90 percent of e-mails are spam.

"[Students] get spam because someone has gotten ahold of their e-mail address," DeMeza said. "We urge all students to be careful when giving away their e-mail address."

The student Helpdesk is also warning students of greeting cards from eGreetings.com and asks that any student who receives this e-mail delete the message without opening any links.

Whitewater Student Government has also realized the problem with spam e-mail and is thinking of new ways to fix them.

"We're trying to find other routes to get information to the students," WSG senator Ashley Carrington said. "What we want to see happen is for e-mail to be used for academic purposes like conversations between students and professors."

Currently, WSG is working on a new events board under the students tab on the UW-Whitewater Web site that will update students on daily campus activity.

"Instead of having so many individual e-mails, students would have a collection they can access," WSG Senator Andrew Meyer said. "Even the public can see what events are happening."

The purpose of this idea is to minimize the amount of e-mail students receive on a daily basis from the university and help prevent the accidental deletions of important e-mails.

"It's easy for me to sit at my computer and see an inbox of 30 and delete things that I don't think are important at the time, but then they come back to haunt me," Meyer said.

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