Email was a great way to communicate a message to the masses, before spammers realized how much money they could make by delivering their junk directly to our inboxes.
Nobody likes spam: it wastes a lot of our time and eats up a lot of our internet service providers’ (ISP) bandwidth. As a result, millions of email users are willing to pay to get rid off these annoying messages, and the major email account providers like Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL have set up systems to filter anything that COULD be spam.
The problem is that spammers are not the only ones to send mass email.
Electronic newsletter publishers do it. So do some Universities and Colleges for most of their communications with students.
In theory, spam filtering shouldn’t be a problem for higher ed institutions as they also provide email accounts to their students. In reality, a lot of students don’t use their edu account in their daily email activity and prefer to forward messages to the email address they have been using since they were 2 years old (remember, we’re dealing with the Net Generation here).
Back to square one.
Most of the time, commercial ISPs filter out mass email from universities/colleges, and students don’t get messages they are supposed to receive, which becomes really problematic for alerts about emergency closings or class cancellations.
As reported in The Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida has decided to fix this problem at the source and will stop providing the email-forwarding option on its email accounts starting next semester.
In her story, UF to make GatorLink e-mail mandatory, Stephanie Garry reports that the decision was made after UF explored other options to no avail.
Marc Hoit, interim vice provost for information technology, has been battling e-mail filters that block UF mail for some time, even joining with other universities to find a solution with AOL, one of the chief mail services that blocks UF mail.
According to The Independent Florida Alligator, similar email policies could soon be implemented in others universities.
Before requiring students to use Webmail, the technology committee contacted approximately 30 members of the Association of American Universities, a prestigious group of 62 North American research universities that includes UF, [Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Michael] Rollo said.
It found that the problem was common throughout the AAU, and many universities are considering taking the same steps, though UF is probably on the forefront of universities requiring students to use their official e-mail service, Rollo said.
If students are not happy with this decision, they probably won’t check their “mandatory” accounts and end up not getting the information either (back to square one, again). They won’t be able to complain, that’s true. Policies are policies, but…
Don’t you think RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds might be a creative (better?) alternative to handle this specific case?
Universities and colleges should seriously think about offering this option to deliver critical alerts and important information. Contrary to email recipients, RSS users always get the information they are supposed to receive. That’s the beauty of RSS (sorry, if I’m preaching to the choir – or am I?) because nobody – except the end user – has the filtering power.
Do you use RSS at your university or college? How do you (plan to) use it?
Share your experience or your thoughts about RSS by posting a comment below or email at karine@collegewebeditor.com (I don’t use a major ISP, so I should get your message ;-).