Can I get a campus-wide email list?–> rec’d today

admin January 15, 2009 communication 6 Comments

I received this request today:

“Hi ___.  I’m writing on behalf of ____, who would like to have a campus-wide distribution list so that our office can send evite invitations and other messages outside of traditional emails to all faculty, staff, and students….Please let us know what options are available when you get a chance.”

Obviously, the sender is well intentioned and a nice person. And, obviously completely unaware of the insanity of this request for a variety of reasons. I was tempted to just pass this along to our email staff and sit back to hear the laughter. Instead, I just said no. But nicely. And said that we could approach the President’s Cabinet and ask to change our practice if she really wanted.

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6 Responses to “Can I get a campus-wide email list?–> rec’d today”

  1. essprit said:

    Jan 16, 09 at 6:16 pm

    well, in the list of “unexpected things to be grateful for”, aren’t you even more relieved that they didn’t ask you to just build a front end to evite, or -even better- a “yer-institution-here” branded evite-like app? Not that anyone I know anywhere would ask for anything like that…

  2. etselec said:

    Jan 17, 09 at 4:37 pm

    I wish you worked where I work.

  3. Sukey said:

    Jan 19, 09 at 6:40 pm

    I think you should of registered the building of such an email list as a service project as per the MLK National Day of Service http://www.mlkday.gov/

    Some volunteers could register to spend the morning canvasing the campus, facebook pages, twitter, and old email messages to create a huge list of emails of every staff, faculty, student, admin. etc.

    Then, in the afternoon, another round of volunteers could register to spend a certain number of hours typing in each email address in a giant TO: address field as a part of this ecard http://tinyurl.com/8zrcl2

  4. admin said:

    Jan 20, 09 at 3:27 pm

    Ohmigod, essprit, I hadn’t even thought of that option. You’re right, it could be a lot worse–you know, like where etselec works.

    Sukey, your idea is amazing. If only we could build some rounds of administrative approval into it, then we’d have a true higher ed IT process. Just know that your posting was delayed because the system thinks posts with more than one URL are spam. But you’re not spamming us. No WAY!

  5. Sukey said:

    Jan 20, 09 at 8:51 pm

    My comments test the fine line between “spam” and “irrelevant”. Same difference, really.

  6. admin said:

    Jan 21, 09 at 5:24 pm

    Sukey, I for one am happy you’re pushing the envelope!

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