by Ben Kenagy

Contributing writer

During my past four years at SE, I have had several conversations with fellow students about the high volume of messages that is sent out to every student email account.

Students constantly receive emails from the names like “SE Announcements,” “SE Athletics” and “SE Health 101,” as well as others from staff members.

I recently decided to do a quick check on just how bad it has gotten by looking over my past 100 emails and counting them as ether spam or other. I considered spam to be any email sent as an unsolicited advertisement for a product or event and “other” to be any email that was not spam.

My count came to 61 spam emails to 49 “other” emails (most of which were conversations with my professors).

I compared this to my Gmail account, which tallied 17 spam emails (of which eight had come from Southeastern) to 83 “other” emails.

Of course, not everything sent from the SE Announcements email address was actually spam.

To make the problem worse, some of the emails sent from the “SE Announcements” address are actually important, such as schedules, holiday hours for various campus services and server down times.

This means that students have to weed through piles of message they don’t care about to make sure they get to the important information.

This would also make it very difficult for spam filters, if student email accounts had spam filters, which we do not.

If a spam filter were set up by the adminstrator, there would be a file labeled spam where emails identified as spam would be automatically sent.

Students could improve the system by moving spam mail into it or pulling non-spam mail out, according to the Convergence online help page, http://webmail.student.se.edu/iwc_static/layout/help/en/mail_spam.html.

So there you have it. Southeastern has given you an email account so that they can send out all the spam they want, and students are left with no means to stop it.