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A Call for a Spam Summit for Higher Education
6/11/2003
If you're like me, filtering e-mail into folders d'esn't work because of that "out of sight, out of mind" thing. Plus, trusting a commercial organization to filter for you sounds like it has potential, but every time I read about someone testing such program's abilities, the report is dismal. I tried using my e-mail client's filtering capabilities to trash spam, dutifully adding character strings from Subject lines and From lines, and I know that it's catching a lot—but there are even more it is not catching. And how dysfunctional is it to have to check a junk e-mail folder regularly, to see what you have missed?
Legal solutions, legislated or adjudicated, are likely to be worse. Will officials and judges understand (or approve of) the unique character of higher education institutions, even private ones, when passing bills that would require "[ADV]" at the beginning of the Subject line of a "commercial" message? Can you imagine the success of any e-mail campaign for new students, or among your alumni, in which messages arrived so-labeled. Yeah.
I don't know the answer, and since I don't have a product, I can admit that I don't know the answer. But I do know where I look when I want something studied and researched—and where I have seen substantial success in the past decades in collaborative, sharing software solutions, especially using open source … I look to higher education.
Let's have the first Spam Summit for Higher Education (SSHE)! I look to higher education to solve this problem for itself—and maybe, in the process, for everyone. Let's bring together IT managers, programmers, CIOs, communicators, researchers, and take a look at the problem with fresh eyes—with an attitude that we can focus higher education's resources on it and solve this problem. Any takers?
Thanks to Dave Dillard of Temple University for his contributions to this piece.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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