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."

Comments

Doubly Strange

[hedronist]

This is more than a bit surreal since SRJC has a long history of being on the net.

For example, Santa Rosa Junior College is one of the very few non-4-year colleges to have a .EDU domain name. In the early 90's they had two junior admins, Dane Jasper and Scott Doty, who went on to become the founders of a Mom-and-Pop Internet company that actually succeeded. It started as Sonoma Interconnect, but is now known as Sonic.net.

It's a shame to add this squirrely episode to that history.

This happens all the time

[Ohio Calvinist]

I worked for the California Community College system. A lot of these schools are running on old exchange installations on aging hardware with tiny quotas, that tend to have poor uptimes. (My school was 60MB for faculty due to Exchange 5.5's 16GB information store limit). Many professors within the college simply told their students to mail them at prof_name.(college_initals)@gmail.com because of higher quotas for massive amounts of students sending poorly optimized attachments as part of their assignment, that was web/client accessible in a better interface than 5.5 had, and had much better uptime. As an institution we advised them to use their college-provided account so IT could view the logs and say "yes or no" this student did/did not attempt to submit their paper ontime.

If anything, this helps students and faculty make sure they are communicating with the right "John Smith, Professor" out there.

Every single student whom crosses the door of SRJC is making a statement that "I feel qualified to be a college-level student." Part of being a student is understanding the tools you use to get the job done. Not taking minimal effort to verify an e-mail address for validity, particularly given most students are forced to use an Online Courseware system that is at something.mycollege.edu, so they know that "this address does not match this address", is no excuse for acting foolishly.

One of the biggest merits of going to any college is that after 18 years of hand-holding in the home and public education spheres, the college is not going to baby sit you, beg you to pay your fees on time, order you to attend lecture (though sadly some professors attempt to to artifically give merit to their poor instruction in the form of attendance-grades), or anything else for that matter. You are there because you want to learn, and almost no career has zero computer interaction, so you should learn to use the computer, just like you learned to read even though you didn't plan on being grammar or literature teacher. I am shocked and disappointed how many people flatly refuse to properly learn to use a tool that can make their job easier. I've never met anyone who "regretted" spending the necessary time to use a computer effectively.