Student Cleared Of Charges She Spammed Teachers At Her University

from the common-sense-prevails dept

Back in December, we wrote about a student at Michigan State University, who was disciplined by the school for spamming, after she sent out an email to all of the professors at the school concerning a schedule change that would impact their class schedules in a future semester. One teacher complained, and the student was found to have violated the school’s anti-spam policy, which said you couldn’t email more than 30 people at a time. This seemed silly, as the message was clearly not spam in the traditional sense at all. After a widespread public outcry, and the EFF preparing a lawsuit on the student’s behalf, the school has backed down and cleared the woman of any wrongdoing, and said that it will review and potentially change its anti-spam policies.

Filed Under: , , ,
Companies: michigan state university

Rate this comment as insightful
Rate this comment as funny
You have rated this comment as insightful
You have rated this comment as funny
Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam
You have flagged this comment
The first word has already been claimed
The last word has already been claimed
Insightful Lightbulb icon Funny Laughing icon Abusive/trolling/spam Flag icon Insightful badge Lightbulb icon Funny badge Laughing icon Comments icon

Comments on “Student Cleared Of Charges She Spammed Teachers At Her University”

Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment
21 Comments
dude101 says:

Geez. This has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve heard of yet. Univerisities generally are not like this and Michigan is obviously an exception to the rule. Since everyone is tossing around the term “teacher” I am wondering what the credentials are of the people involved.

Teachers are not professors. Professors are generally who lectures at a University and most do not ‘teach’. If it was a teacher with a BEd degree then all I can is I’m not surprised. Generally, professors are so wrapped up in their research that they rarely have time for such petty complaints. And I know of none that would do such a thing to harm a students career (esp. when they are helping the system).

Jasen Webster (profile) says:

Reject emails

The university should reconfigure their email system. Most have an option to reject emails with more than X recipients. If this is a result of emailing a particular group, then that group should be eliminated or modified to allow allow emails from certain people. These problems occur in the business world as well, but the answer is not discipline, but rather teaching email etiquette.

Instead of modifying the policy for future abusers, why not be proactive and prevent issues like this by reconfiguring their email system?

Andrew D. Todd (user link) says:

Spammer deleted, #18

To Mike Masnick:

You are of course very patient with some of your correspondents.

A small technical note: It is better to replace the offending message with “Message Deleted” or whatever, so that the comment numbers and URL’s of the following comments remain stable.

This is something we’ve encountered more in the political blogs, because grown men of fifty and sixty sometimes lose their tempers and begin screaming at each other.

Leave a Reply to dude101 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here

Comment Options:

Make this the or (get credits or sign in to see balance) what's this?

What's this?

Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »

Follow Techdirt

Techdirt Daily Newsletter

Ctrl-Alt-Speech

A weekly news podcast from
Mike Masnick & Ben Whitelaw

Subscribe now to Ctrl-Alt-Speech »
Techdirt Deals
Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
Loading...