Thursday, September 24, 2009

Spam@School

Emails to a parent kept getting rejected today by that parent's mail server, so I called our district techies to ask why. What I learned was somewhat disturbing.

Our district gets either 40,000 spam hits per second or per minute; either way, it's a huge number. A few do sneak through the filters*, and when unsuspecting staff actually respond or otherwise do something stupid, the spammers are in and start using our district email accounts to send spam. Because of this, a popular web-based mail site has blacklisted us--and I cannot email this parent until our techies clear up the situation with the mail site, which might take up to a week.

Wow.

*The ones that sneak through usually offer sexual dysfunction-related medications, want to introduce me to hot Russian women for love and romance, or are communications from my good friends in Ghana, Nigeria, or Kenya.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

Many of our kids put in their own emails for their parents so that they can intercept communications. They do the same thing with cell phone numbers. And there are a number of kids who if they were hurt, we would have no viable address or number to reach parents or responsible parties because of changes in cell carriers, changes in addresses and other changes based on whims and fashion.

Dan Edwards said...

Darren, you do realize that your assistance to that former highly placed Nigerian gentlemen will greatly enhance your own finances? Dude, what are you waiting for ???? :-)