As the Presidential-election season begins to heat up, the e-mail addresses of the University of Iowa’s 40,000 students and faculty and staff members
CYBERCULTURE:
“We can’t do too much about spam from the outside, but e-mail that is authorized by the university is not spam,” says a university administrator.
are becoming a valuable commodity.
In September, an organization called Students for Bush requested the institution’s e-mail addresses because it wanted to send out information about joining the group. The resulting controversy has prompted the university to review its e-mail policies.
Under Iowa law, the addresses are considered public information, university officials say. Anyone can come to the university and obtain the addresses for a small service charge. Students can also download the addresses free, 20 at a time, from the university’s Web site.
The Students for Bush message “didn’t say, ‘Vote for George W. Bush,’” recalls Steven R. Parrott, interim director of university communications and outreach. “The message said, ‘If you’re interested in helping Bush, here are the contacts on campus.’ Instead of selling them the e-mail addresses, we said, ‘Give us the message, and we’ll send it out as a one-time mailing.’”
That wasn’t a move popular with everyone, however. Complaints from students and faculty and staff members were such that the institution set up a Web page explaining its e-mail policy.
“We’re not anti-politics -- we are neutral and must appear to be neutral,” says Mark Schantz, the university’s general counsel. “When you get legislative appropriations, you try to be careful.” Some people on the campus thought sending any message with a political content was inappropriate, he says, and others thought of it as spamming. “We can’t do too much about spam from the outside, but e-mail that is authorized by the university is not spam,” he says.
Mr. Schantz, who has consulted the state’s Attorney General on this and other e-mail issues, says there is little the university can do to block the use of e-mail addresses by political organizations. “In our state, under our public-records laws, any e-mail list we have is considered a public record,” he says, and is considered as public as a list of telephone numbers.
Still, Mr. Parrott says the university wants to have a revamped e-mail policy in place to accommodate future requests from registered student groups, whichever candidates they support. “We will comply with future requests, but we’re going to put our policy into place before we do another one,” says David Dobbins, associate director of the university’s information-technology services.
The institution is considering a variety of options, including setting up its own bulk e-mail service, which would be available for a fee. E-mail users could choose to filter out certain types of messages, which would be coded by keywords. Someone sending bulk mail to campus addresses who didn’t use the service would be “in violation of our acceptable-use policies,” says Mr. Dobbins, and would be subject to fines or other sanctions.
The best method to handle both the political hardball and the bulk e-mail issues is, appropriately, education, says Mr. Dobbins. Almost all of the e-mail systems that are used on campus -- Eudora, Outlook, and Netscape -- have filtering options, and users should be taught how to use them according to their own needs, he says.
