Lauren Garrison at at Hour is reporting that the email system used by the Norwalk Public Schools system is inundated with thousands of spam emails. You would think that Dr. Sal Corda would be concerned, but no, this situation has been going on since summer when the IT department decided to switch form GroupWise to something else. Presumably they are now using Microsoft Exchange. With no bayesian filters, or other anti-spam/virus tools. How else to explain the lack of content filtering? I bet they spent a significant amount of money to deploy this “change” and decrease the performance of their email. This is what hack IT people end up doing when they drink the Microsoft kool-aide.
At the end of last school year, the district changed over from GroupWise e-mail to Outlook e-mail. Teachers received no training at the time on the new system.
Gaber called the messages she received “inappropriate for an educational setting,” and added, “some of them were inappropriate for any setting.” She stressed that she had not visited any Web sites that would indicate she was interested in these subjects.
They were “financial, pharmaceutical and sexual” in nature, she said, and “not something I expected to find in my professional e-mail.”
She found the financial e-mails that included her name most disturbing.
“The idea that my name is out there—that they know how to reach me at my business with what I can only assume are illegitimate financial offers — is very disturbing to me,” she said.
According to Gaber, GroupWise e-mail was filtered at Central Office, so the faculty and staff never received the inappropriate messages. With Outlook, individual users must manually set up the filter on their own email.
Central Office sent out an e-mail on July 31 explaining to users how to filter their e-mail. Once she followed these directions, Gaber said her problems were solved, for the most part. Five to ten emails slip through into her inbox every now now, she said, but that doesn’t bother her much.
However, for the majority of teachers who did not check their e-mail during the summer, the filter instructions from Central Office were buried in a mound of junk e-mail, and easy to miss.
“The idea that they expect every teacher to put on their own filters,” Gaber said. “Couldn’t they have done that from downtown (Central Office)? Why didn’t they put the filter on when they set up Outlook?”
Wasting money on construction projects, wasting money on textbooks and wasting money on technology. Does any of this surprise you? There are so many open-source, zero cost software server solutions out there that Norwalk could have pursued. What a waste.
source: THe Hour, Spam troubles for teachers, by Lauren Garrison, October, 6, 2007
