Spam and the Nordakademie

This actually is a pretty funny topic and I really feel that I’ve got to blog about it (though it is quite critic about the Nordakademie, which could get me into serious trouble, as long as I am still enrolled).

At our university we’ve got different mailing lists. For instance, there’s the students@nordakademie – to rule reach them all, there’s also the i, w or b@nordakademie to reach the different faculties. And of course there’s the possibility to write to every class individually. As well as every year, etc (I guess you’ll get the idea).

You could imagine how this could be used for spamming. Anyhow, what I’d like to focus on now is internal spam. Yes, on the one hand there’s a anti-spam engine that actually should prevent spam, but as it always tells you that it actually detected spam, that was intended to get to you, and asks you whether or not it did the right thing to block it (and yes, there is a white list function, but actually it doesn’t work – I regularly white-list those mails that should get to me (i.e. mails from the partner university?!)). So actually instead of getting rid of spam, it doubles the work that I would have had, when everything was actually getting through, and I’d just had to delete those spam mails (which actually you’ll recognize anyhow, without opening – so a tick for each, and a delete all. Pretty easy steps – at least it’s easier than that stupid anti-spam engine).

Still, this is also not the topic – there’s another quite interesting phenomena, about which I’d like to write today.

As you could imagine, you could send a lot of information that you consider useful to all of the students (for instance, as there are some running fanatics at our university, you’d get up to 10 mails every month, concerning running events – some of them even send by professors). Eventually it so happens, that every now and then one of this mails is considered spam-worthy. I’m not into that science, so I cannot tell you anything about the processes and rituals behind the scenes, through which a mail has to go to in order to be considered spam worthy. But still, if it reaches that state, it so happens that all of a sudden the secret spamming society at Nordakademie reveals itself, answering to this mail, to every student we have (using those mailing lists shown above). Right now, this is again one of these special moments. The funny thing: No one other than the students seems to realize. Of course there are those moments, when a professor is angry at the students, because no one has read his mail. He then get’s the excuse that it must have gone lost between the 500 mails that where send over the last 24 hours. But other than that, nothing ever happens.

Now maybe I am a killjoy, but there I am, checking my mails, as I wait for important information, getting all this junk, getting angry, getting annoyed – and being the unhappy person that I already am, I get grumpy…
So what I did was I contacted our two admins. Those admins that seems to be the parents of Tinky Winky & Co., directly emigrated from Teletubby land not capable of handling anything other than Tubby Toast and Tubby Custard. Hard words, but hey! – if you’ll ever need to wait half an hour to just print something, because each Pentium4 Computer with 4GB RAM and Windows 2000 in our university network needs a 20 minutes boot time (because actually there’s an installation image that actually is transferred from a server to the client, to actually ensure that there’s nothing wrong with the machine, so actually when booting the machine, the first thing that is actually done is downloading an image of actually approx. 5GB!? Now imagine a class, having their first lecture, at 9 o’clock, starting about 50 Computers at the same time: Halleluiah!)… What else could you say?

But again, that’s not the topic. I consider it reasonable, that admins block spam, and I consider it reasonable, that if I get 50 mails in less than 24 hours, where students just copy bullshit into mails (like socio-political articles that have nothing to do with the topic), greet other students, or argue about whether or not to have garlic sauce at the next pizzeria, or bully each other, as some idiots just feed the trolls by telling them to stop it and than themselves start to openly answer everything that follows that comment – I would consider this kind of mailing spam, wouldn’t you?
So it’s somehow reasonable to consider that the admins should do something against those mails (“Admins against spam” ∧ “Students do spam mailing” → “Admins against students that do spam mailing”). Be it to block the unique message ID of those mails. Be it to block the Subject. Be it to just send of a mail to all students, warning them off. And of course, taking actions if students still misbehave.

But the response of the admins I got was following:

Hey, this is not our responsibility. We consider you to be old enough to handle such things by yourself. We’re not kindergarteners.

Well, of course there’s a truth in us not being children that need to be watched over, but still, somehow I feel that if a system is compromised in any way, and used in other ways than the ones it was intended to – and even used in a kind of manner, that you could interpret it in the slightest way as a “denial of service” (as I cannot seriously use a mail account that actually produces more spam mails every day, than mails that I want – in a situation where on the other hand I need to regularly check for mails, as I am waiting for important information), that then admins should take some kind of action.

The irony of the story: When I once used the mailing list to actually communicate something important, the mail was blocked. So, because of a change of schedules two of my weekend seminars took place at the same time (oh, how could this happen?!). It is a rule that if you cannot participate in a seminar you enrolled to, you have to find a substitute. So, as I found out on a Thursday evening, that my Saturday-Sunday seminar was postponed, I used the mailing list to find a substitute (though I didn’t consider it my mistake, as I was present, and as it is not in my power of rescheduling the dates of seminars!). On Friday I wasn’t online, on Saturday I realized that my mail was blocked, and I got a personal(!) mail from an admin, telling me that such requests are considered spam, and that I should use the forum (some crappy shit, no one uses! So whenever you write something into it, you can be 100% sure, that no one reads it – but actually as you can prove that you tried, no one get’s angry with you – I somehow can’t help having the funny thought that maybe they don’t care about you finding a substitute? Maybe it’s just some bureaucratic bullshit, that you have to do, and if you don’t, you get punished – but no one ever asks at all, whether or not this makes sense?).

The story ends with the fact, that not only did I get a letter from my university, but also my company, where my University complained about the fact, that I did not participate, and that I did not try to find another student as substitute, and that in my selfish act I not only took the opportunity from other students to participate, but also did I put the Nordakademie in a bad light, as external lectures have to lecture in front of far less students than expected. And of course, this bad light is reflected to all the companies associated to the Nordakademie. So actually I draged my company into a bad reputation! Should I have asked the question, whether or not the lecturer even realized me being missing?
Evil me… (Shall we talk about all those seminars that cannot take place, as there are to little students interested in them? This seminar actually was one of them…
Oh, and what about that seminars that are crappy because there’s no IT support for it?*).

But hey, I am not unforgiving, so let’s all have a Tubby Big Hug!^TM and hope that Noo-Noo will clean up all the mess… uhm I mean spam! And as I consider it to be brighter than our admins, maybe it’ll handle our network as well – the results couldn’t get worse…

* You need to immagine: We have a seminar on Windows 2003 Server, we have this Seminar for 5 years now, and for 5 years the lecturer is asking for some kind of (virtual) environment, so that we could install and configure the Server ourselfs, as this doesn’t make any sense if you just show it to the students.
What this lecturer actually does now, is to ask the students to download VM Ware’s virtual machine, install it, and then not to turn of the computers over night (it’s a two days seminar), as then the pc’s immage is overwritten again, and all the progress is gone.
So we actually spend half the seminar with work-arounds to use the Nordakademies computer equippment than with doing what we should: Installing and configuring a Windows 2003 Server….

What kind of impression do you think this leaves to external lecturers?