How I stopped a department from spamming the entire university

"Seeking Seymour Butts for delivery purposes"

Our university is not small, but it’s homey. Yes, enrollment exceeds 15,000 and we employ a ton of people. However, there’s a local emotional pull on our campus that gives the vibe of a mom-and-pop shop rather than a major educational retailer. This is good in a lot of ways. The personal touch can be nice in the midst of all of our bureaucracy.

Yet the mismatch between the small campus vibe and the actuality of a large workplace is a major drag. The epitome of this drag is our campus email list, which is like one of those community cork boards down at the co-op where Roger is trying to rehome an underproducing chicken with a charming personality and Ethel is selling pottery of questionable utility. (That said, the annual pottery sale from the ceramics course? That’s an email worth getting.)

Our all-campus list, called DH email (which is short for Dominguez Hills), goes to every employee on campus by default. While the permission to originate an email to the DH list is restricted, there are no restrictions on replying. By default, any reply to the DH-email address is a reply to the entire campus.

Which meant that if someone posts a schedule for the university concert series, it would not be unexpected for some friend of the poster to reply to everybody on campus to them if they wanted to catch lunch the next day. You would expect this all-campus mailing list to regularly descends into reply-all-paloozas, featuring the same seven characters, and you’d be correct. This has been a smoldering dumpster fire became it has lacked the required moderation.

Why not just remove oneself from this list? Because this mailing list is also where time-sensitive critical information is distributed by our administration. (Oh, we also have the same thing for the all-faculty list, which is just as bad. Actually this morning there is a whole back-and-forth about some professor who was kicked out of a zoom meeting, and who is to blame, and what limits there are on what you can say in such a meeting, etc. I assure you that 99.5% of the people getting this email give zero cares about this whatsoever.) Ugh.

My pet peeve has been one particular category of email that exemplifies this ridiculousness:

From: Logistical Services

To: DH Email

Re: Seeking Dr. Sparks for delivery purposes

Hello, we are trying to locate the aforementioned person.

Thank you in advance for any information you may provide.

That is an actual email. These have been regular occurrence for at least as long as I’ve worked there. Apparently whenever mail services got something for a person and they couldn’t figure out who it was supposed to go to, they simply decided to… email the whole campus? Yes, apparently. That’s the situation. We have our own Zip Code! When they couldn’t figure out where to send a package, they’d email everybody at the Zip Code.

In my complete archive of university emails, I have several hundred of these.

I just couldn’t get over this. It just bugged me so much that some person in the mail room thought it was okay to email the entire university because when the have a piece of mail with a name on it and they didn’t know where to deliver it.

One day at work I got an email in which Logistical Services were trying to find “Bridger Jimenez” and I had reached the proverbial last straw.

After putting up with this for well more than a decade, I decided to take things into my own hands by pulling a Bart Simpson.

I created a new account with the company that our campus has a contract with for office supplies. I tried to anonymize myself as much as possible. I used a cash-value credit card, created a separate email address, and ordered a Red Swingline Stapler.

I had it delivered to our University directed to the “Department of” and the name of the recipient was Seymour Butts.

After one day, the stapler arrived on campus. And it was signed by the office that sends out these emails!

I anxiously awaited a new campuswide email with the subject line:

“Seeking Seymour Butts for delivery purposes”

but it never came. I have no idea where the red Swingline is. We are approaching the two-year anniversary.

Dear reader, while the email did not get sent out, I would like to report to you 100% success. These logistical services emails stopped. Seymour Butts did the trick.

I don’t know if my prank triggered the realization that our mailing list was being abused, but I’m tempted to take at least a little bit of the credit. The timing seems spot on, at least.

For full disclosure, we did receive one of those emails several months later. In April 2022, we got a “Seeking Israel Sandoval for delivery purposes” email. But it’s been now a year and a half since then, and not a peep as far as I can tell. I should add that this list has been getting better moderation over the past year or two, thank goodness, and I’m sure this overall improvement is not because of Seymour Butts.

If y’all still have that packing kicking around mail services, you could deliver it to me in the Science and Innovation Building in the Biology office. It’s a beauty.