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May 11, 2009, 12:45 PM ET
'Emailgate': College Triggers Uproar With Warning of Legal Action Over Private Accounts
Plenty of universities have outsourced e-mail to companies like Google. Here’s another twist on the issue: One community college is fighting to prevent students and faculty members from using its name in their private e-mail addresses or domain names.
Santa Rosa Junior College triggered a backlash by warning of “legal action” if people failed to remove its name, Sonoma County’s Press Democrat reported.
At issue: about 100 people who include “Santa Rosa Junior College” or the acronym “SRJC” in private accounts with companies like Google and Yahoo — for example, addresses such as “JohnDoe_SRJC@yahoo.com.”
The California college says it hopes to prevent confusion over which e-mail addresses are official and which are not. Also, someone could use the acronym to trick people, a college official told the Press Democrat.
But the newspaper quoted a local attorney saying the college’s legal argument was baseless. Michael Aparicio, a Santa Rosa philosophy professor, went further. He called for an investigation and lambasted his employer in a blog post for what “seems like an aggressive act of hubris.” In a subsequent post, he dubbed the uproar “Emailgate.”
The college quickly backpedaled. Although Santa Rosa’s president, Robert Agrella, approved a letter asking that people remove the college’s name from their e-mail addresses “to avoid any future legal action,” Mr. Agrella told the Press Democrat that the college was not in fact threatening to take people to court. Letters are typically all it takes to stop unauthorized use of the college’s name, he added.
“We have never had to go any further in my 19 years here than asking the person to stop using the name,” Mr. Agrella said in the newspaper’s follow-up report. “We have people I’m sure that are going to test us. But it’s not our intent to go out and sue a lot of people.”
Mr. Agrella is right about people testing him. Another blogger accused officials from his college of being boorish bullies and invited readers to write in at her new “Special Resources for Journalistic Computing” addresses. Those would be “SRJC.Loonies@gmail.com” and “SRJC-Lunatics@vortex.com.” —Marc Parry
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