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College Threatens Students Over Email Addresses
superdave98 writes "As a sign that a CIO has way too much time on his hands, Santa Rosa Junior College is sending emails threatening lawsuits to staff and students who have the letters 'SRJC' in their private email addresses. They contend that people could be confused and think these are official email addresses. Sure, I suppose people who fall for 419 scams probably could be fooled, but not any reasonable humans. I can't believe they found a lawyer who thought this was a good idea."
I'm not saying I'm surprised; because idiocy is hardly surprising; but this move shows both legal asshattery and truly incredible ignorance of the technically mediated mores that exist on the internet.
With an email address, everybody knows that the local-part (before the @) is arbitrary and the domain corresponds, of course, to a domain. Using the local-part as an organizational identifier, except in flaky ad-hoc setups for small sub organizations(student_club@school.edu style), just isn't done. The domain is always where you look for organizational information.
This seems to be a case where somebody(who should know better, since he is part of their tech department) is treating all parts of the email address as being equally salient. If somebody had grabbed santarosa.com or santarosacollege.com (as opposed to the school's santarosa.edu) and was using email addresses in that domain for misleading purposes, I could sympathize with the case. Trying to dictate the form of email address local-parts from other domains is just bullshit, though.
If that's the only way they'll learn what a three-year-old can learn otherwise, then yes, that's what I'm seriously saying. Hot coffee is hot. This shouldn't be something that requires any further explanation, disclaimers, cautionary tales, or legal proceedings. Not in any sane situation, anyway. But it seems that my post was flamebait, so whatever. I guess I'm just a cranky bastard that thinks that common sense is a valuable commodity that happens to be scarce lately.