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Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage |
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and Modern English Grammar |
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Dear
Starting Fall 2005, the college is finally providing each student with an email address. Thank goodness. About time. For more than a decade, the college refused to consider the possibility of providing email accounts for students, despite requirements to protect student privacy. A college-generated email account helps to ensure that only the students themselves will see their grades, assignments, records, and such. This is great news and long overdue.
And when I say "refused to consider the possibility of providing each student with an email address," I mean that literally. I pushed for such a system for students since the mid-1990s. Then, in 2000, I was told personally (and in a not-so-friendly way) that "the administration has elected not to provide email"1 to the students of the College of DuPage, thereby forcing students to fend for themselves instead, despite the college's ethical obligations.
Fortunately, times change, and now the college has reversed its policy2 so that students will have a college-generated email account — a service that other schools offered since 1995. Yes, the college is a bit late in this regard, but this is still good news. Consequently, for our online class, I will only send/receive course related mail to/from the student email account provided by the college3.
I have been teaching online — through my own servers — for a long time, long before the college discovered the internet and long before the college decided to provide email for the faculty even, and I know first hand how extremely slow the college is to adopt anything that resembles innovation. So the fact that the college will take this step means that I will support it wholeheartedly. I also know that means you will have to forego using your favorite personal email account for this course, but I think this change in college policy is worth the trouble for everyone in the long run.
Secondly, I have another very important reason for you to use only the COD-assigned email address for class — my anti-spam filters. I have some very effective, very powerful anti-spam filters on my mail server. Those filters attack spam like pit bulls hopped up on a cocktail of steroids and cocaine. Yet if you send mail to me through your college-assigned email address, your mail will always get through to me. However, if you send mail to me from your private email account, I can not guarantee that I will ever see it or know you even tried. So that is the best reason to use only your college-assigned email address for class.4
That said, let me now point you toward the most reliable way to send mail to me — the Contact Form. Through the Contact Form, you can send me both messages and files. Advantages of using the Contact Form include a confirmation email to let you know that your mail has arrived and an option to send copies of your messages to your email account as well. (The option to send yourself a copy works only if you register your name and email address [Log In].) Finally, by sending your assignments through the Contact Form, the server creates a log of all the mail received: the advantage of that will come later in the course when you write, "Hey, Kies, I don't have a grade for essay 1. Didn't you receive it?" The answer likely is "No, I didn't receive it," which creates a problem because I will not accept late work. If you send assignments through the Contact Form, I can check the server logs as independent verification that it was sent on time. A saving grace.
Did I mention that the Contact Form is the most reliable way to send mail to me?
Best regards,
Notes:1 Gary Wenger, then Vice President of Information Technology, College of DuPage, 23 February 2000, ad hoc meeting on email and web technologies in education.
2 In an email dated 19 May 2005, the college reversed previous policy and announced that "As of Fall Semester, students will be issued a COD e-mail address. The implementation of this new e-mail system and its procedures is planned for ... August 20th [2005] ...." This will help. Finally, each student will have an email address.
By August, 2005, the college will boldly try to advance all the way to 1995! Outstanding.3 The student email system contains extensive online help as well as tutorials on how to use the features within the site. If you are not able to find solutions to your questions online, you may contact the Student Help Desk at 630-942-2999 or via email at studenthelp@dupage.edu.
The Student Help Desk is available during the following hours:
· Monday – Friday 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
· Saturday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
· Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
The Student Help Desk will only be able to answer questions regarding use of the student email system.4 As John Markoff of the New York Times points out in his January 7, 2007 article, "Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat",
"... more than 80 percent of all spam now originates from botnets. Last month, for the first time ever, a single Internet service provider generated more than one billion spam e-mail messages in a 24-hour period ... that indicated that machines of the service providers’ customers had been woven into a giant network, with a single control point using them to pump out spam."
Personally, on average, I am receiving 40,000 emails each day, and only about 200 are legitimate. All the rest is spam, a mixed dung heap of pills, porn, phishers, stupid stocks, and mortgage moochers. (How the cretinous online casino clods missed me, I don't know.) All of that spam is killed quite effectively by my server's spam filters.
At times, when there is a particularly heavy flood of spam arriving, the server is killing spam at the rate of 128,000 emails/day. Can you imagine? That's 5,333 emails/hour, 89 emails/minute, or 1.5 emails/second. And though it's strangely comforting to know from Markoff that many people are witnessing the same problem, I can tell you from personal experience that the spam problem is getting dramatically worse. Just 18 months ago, the server was killing about 2,000 spam emails each day. Now, it's increased many-fold on average. Bloody mess.
So that is yet another reason why it has always been important for the college to implement a mail system for students: in that flood of poison, it helps to know that there is one source of mail that is real. So use your college-assigned email account for your courses.
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