Getting out of e-mail hell: spam, recruiting, and scalability are all good reasons to reassess e-mail needs - Online

University Business, March, 2004 by C.L. Gaska

A primary mode of communication for conducting university business, e-mail easily ranks as one of the top 10 technologies faculty, staff, and students can't live without. According to the industry research firm Radicati Group (www.radicati.com), total global spending on messaging equipment by educational institutions reached an estimated $315 million in 2003, with around $139 million of this accounted for by North American institutions. Higher education probably accounts for 35 percent of these figures: $110M worldwide, and $49M in North America, say Radicati analysts.

Yet still, e-mail scores high as a top time waster at IHEs everywhere. Shuffling through unwanted messages to find the ones that matter is as frustrating for university denizens as for anyone. Combine that with organizing, responding to, and storing the daily influx, and message management quickly becomes a challenge on both the sending and receiving end of the e-mail chain. Certainly, e-mail is a legitimate form of business correspondence and must reflect the professional stature and cultural feel of a university, but in this day and age, a technology generally considered an asset can teeter precariously close to the edge of liability without proper integration and management. For IHEs, the daily issues and aggravations are many, but smart schools are assessing need carefully, before they invest in new product solutions.

PUT SIMPLY: SPAM

According recent stats collected by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on any given day a whopping 40 percent of all e-mail moving through that university's server is spam, and a staggering 75 percent of all mail originating from off campus is considered spam.

When it comes to determining what is spam and what is not, though volume e-mail often looks like spam, it is really the content that matters, say the experts. Most current spam filtering software looks for key words and phrases such as "mailing list," "no obligation," the word "remove" in the subject line, or even disclaimers such as "this is not spam." Then, based on the content of each suspicious e-mail, the system will attach a score that reflects the probability that the message is spam. If the score falls within a certain range, the message is directed to an alternate mailbox, if not, it is ushered into the user's inbox. The thing is, universities--bastions of free expression that they are--are less likely than other institutions or businesses to filter out seemingly offensive of undesirable content. They prefer to err on the side of less, not more, censorship. And that can make the life of an e-mail manager--not to mention the daily cleanup by all university faculty, staffers, and students--a nightmare.

"Universities are very reluctant to block a lot of anything coming in," says Anthony Comazzi, VP of Messaging Solutions for the Newman Group (www.nofailemail.net), a systems integrator with a focus on higher ed and a division devoted to messaging reliability and security. (Client IHEs include the University of Illinois, Philadelphia's Temple University, and Troy State in Alabama.) Yet, at the same time, Comazzi stresses, incoming spam can have a profound impact on storage resources and can literally block channels of communication, making it "an enormous issue."

Still, though most universities do try to filter a certain level of spam to a dedicated mailbox, they still rely on human filters--end users--to answer the question of "trash or treasure?" E-mail pros can't help but wonder when school administrators will reach their spam saturation points and holler "uncle."

RECRUITMENT E-MAIL: DON'T HIT DELETE!

On the flip side of the spam issue is that of targeted recruitment e-mails: those messages you don't want prospective students to think of as spam! Such messages must find their way through various spam filters (those of an Internet service provider and institutional servers, for instance) to land on the computer screens of high school students--along with the messages from their friends, links to the latest rock downloads, et al. Obviously, sending a legitimate, unsolicited e-mail to a prospective student takes great care and finesse, and should not even be attempted, say the pros, without first making sure the recipient indeed wants or needs to hear from you (whether he knows it yet, of not).

To increase the chances that those messages will get noticed, colleges need to deliver a coordinated marketing message over time and sustain successful one-to-one relationships with all their prospective students, says Kevin Montgomery, system administrator for the University of Saint Mary (KS). What's more, students who have expressed interest in a university should receive a personalized e-mail, never a form letter, says Montgomery. This can be more than challenging for an institution with thousands or tens of thousands of potential applicants, but such messages are much more likely to survive the perils of spam fitters or manic e-mail deleters. Short of these measures, Montgomery says his school's policy is simple: "We don't send e-mail to people who have never expressed interest in USM."