Licence to spam

Over a year ago we had some discussions inside the Computing Service about better provision for large mailing lists within the University. At the moment we rely too much on paper spam, and electronic spam is distributed to staff by departmental administrators who manually forward irrelevant utterances from the Old Schools. My hope was that officially sanctioned mailing lists for internal communications would improve this situation because, as well as being more efficient, there would be better moderation and recipients would be able to unsubscribe. We approved a document which I thought was quite good, and which I expected would live alongside our existing, very general, bulk email guidelines. This then went to the IT Syndicate for approval.

Unfortunately the IT Syndicate was disbanded at about this time to be replaced by an Information Services and Strategy Syndicate which has a broader remit. The large list policy got dropped for several months as the committee rebooted. When the work item was picked up again it somehow got corrupted. It was rewritten with absolutely no input from us, and it replaced the bulk email policy instead of being adopted alongside it. As a result there is now almost no policy against spam intentionally sent by University members to recipients inside and outside the University. I am extremely annoyed.

The new policy is on the ISSS web site and I'll put a copy of the old policy behind a cut to preserve it after Google's cache expires.

( Old bulk email policy )