Email Update

by Larissa Backhaus

Simpson students are continuously bombarded with hundreds of emails a week, with about 90 percent of these emails going straight to the trash. 

Well, this is about to change. 

The current mass email list policy is being revised to reduce the overflow of emails being sent to faculty and students. 

“Starting on Tuesday, April 1, if students or employees of the college have an event that they want to publicize, they will need to enter it into the events web calender on the Simpson website,” Vice President of Information Services Kelley Bradder said. 

Because of the email overflow, Bradder said, “Emails are not being read and important information is being missed. We hope to cut down the volume of emails that are being sent to the lists and organize event information so it will be easier to find.”

Student Government Association (SGA) member Connor Johnson helped approve these changes to the mass email list policy. 

“The basic idea is that we are removing emails that announce events. Instead, these events will be entered into a web calendaring system. From there, the events are organized into two summarized newsletters. There will be ‘Prominent’ or ‘Featured Events Newsletter’ and a ‘Daily Events Newsletter’,” Johnson said. 

Johnson said featured events like forums, sports games and theater productions will be emailed to the whole campus Monday afternoons. 

Daily events approved by the Activities Office, like organization meetings or programs, will be sent out every morning. 

Along with the mass email policy changes, Johnson mentioned the listservs would be used more frequently. 

“A listserv is basically a list students within the email program to which a person can send emails.”

“Emails destined for specific persons, such as those within a specific department or major, will only go to those people instead of the student body,” Johnson said. “If I had the power to change something else about the policy, I would change the policy on surveys. Especially around this time of the year, there seems to be an abundance of surveys sent out to the student population. I would like to see something in the changes we made that address this issue to further cut down email traffic.”

This adjustment in email policy will be a change for students. Johnson said, “I think once we implement the change and people get familiar with the new way of doing things, it will be widely accepted by the student body, faculty and staff alike.”