As college students, we are flooded with emails everyday. Some are important in some form or another, like a professor emailing the class about an important update. Yet, other emails we receive are not important at all, and in fact are random spam. These emails, though annoying, are a huge problem here at Saint Anselm, and are preying on students in financial distress and hardship. 

Consider the many emails offering students a job. $500 a week would be amazing for anyone, but particularly for us as college students. It could help in paying towards our tuition, or paying towards anything really. But that is the catch. It’s not real, and we all know it. The reality is that the minimum wage in New Hampshire is a pitiful $7.25 an hour. Unfortunately, this money scam is common, and is used to take advantage of those just to enrich someone else. This is not only wrong, but it belies greed and corruption at a certain level. 

Beyond that, there are other scams that are not just money, but emails that exist for no good reason at all. Why is this the case? The best answer I can give is that due to how servers work, there are ways to use a person’s account to send out emails to people without the actual person doing it. If there is any way for the college to do something about it, I hope something can be done. There is nothing with making sure that we as students don’t have to deal with this and preventable measures can be taken to make sure that this isn’t a problem going forward. 

One measure could be email verification or a change of passwords that has us authenticate who is behind the email, without risking us with spam. The Office of Information Technology announced that multi-factor authentication will be enabled for all Saint Anselm email addresses on Nov. 14 at 10 a.m. They also recommend downloading the Okta verify app if you haven’t already so you are prepared for the change.

Beyond this, we can try to do something about spam emails in general, especially ones telling us to buy stuff. We are overwhelmed with various products and where to go, so at least in my opinion, it makes no sense to try and tell us to buy more when we may not need it. Americans consume some of the most in the developed world, while we lack in reflecting on what is important in our lives.  

We may have to live with scams and spam emails for the time being, but at least proposing solutions could be important to solving that issue that exists. Hopefully something comes up which allows us to do anything about it.