Freshmen Receive Spam E-Mails

Over 30 unsolicited e-mails have spammed the inboxes of 1,105 freshmen since Monday afternoon, when Harvard Yard Operations (Yard Ops) failed to hide the recipients of an e-mail containing move-out information.

“What happened was very simply a mistake,” said Zak M. Gingo ’98, manager of administrative operations for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ physical resources, who also runs Yard Ops.

He said Yard Ops sent the e-mail “to remind folks about end-of-the-year things to think about.”

According to Gingo, the person who entered the list of recipients into the e-mail accidentally failed to use the blind carbon copy (BCC) mode, which would have hidden the addresses.

“Our standard policy is to BCC anything that is going out as a group message,” he said.

Several students who received Monday’s e-mail proceeded to send replies to all of the recipients, which ranged from silly babble to profanity or song lyrics.

One of the students who e-mailed all 1,105 addressees, Max D. Chalfin ’08, said he was the subject of an act of retaliation from one of many disgruntled classmates angered by the spam.

According to Chalfin, he and all of the other students who had spammed the recipients of the Yard Ops message received an e-mail Monday night from an anonymous Yahoo! account with the subject line “Dear Classmates.”

The body of the e-mail—“obviously [from] someone who was angry”—contained “an explicit midget pornography photograph,” Chalfin said.

When Chalfin responded, calling the image “inappropriate,” the anonymous vigilante struck again.

“He took my address and went to a bunch of online midget porn subscription pages,” Chalfin said, adding that he received another e-mail from the Yahoo! account shortly thereafter informing him of his new subscriptions.

“I’m not really mad,” said Chalfin, calling the exchange “more funny than anything else.”

Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans wrote in an e-mail that “the spamming which has occurred...violates University guidelines for Harvard network use, a fact which we pointed out to first-years today in a message drafted by the computer staff and sent by [the Freshman Dean’s Office] to all first-years.”

The message to freshmen quoted a portion of Harvard’s computing rules that prohibits “unauthorized mass electronic mailings.”

But Chalfin said spammed students should not overreact to the annoyance. “Twenty extra e-mails that you would get in a day—maybe 30—should not be the thing that ruins your entire day.”

—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.