‘A Massive Headache’: Students Frustrated by Malfunctioning Club Email List | News

Club and home e-mail lists managed by the Harvard Computer Society have been down for not less than the previous week, leaving college students pissed off and at midnight.

HCS, a student-run pc science group based within the Eighties, began providing mailing listing providers to golf equipment on campus earlier than Harvard carried out its personal system. Though some teams go for mailing lists on different websites, various golf equipment proceed to make use of the HCS platform to publicize occasions and speak to membership members.

HCS co-president Will C. Cooper ’23-’24 wrote in an e-mail estimating that “50-75 lively membership lists and on the dimensions of 10,000 inactive lists” are on HCS-run servers.

Cooper wrote HCS is conscious of the problems with the mailing listing, which he attributed to an expired SSL certificates — a safety measure — and connection points with the group’s distant Amazon Web Services server.

In late February, membership leaders started reporting issues with the e-mail lists to HCS, although the lists had been “nonetheless largely usable” at that time, Cooper wrote.

The downside intensified by April 4, when most undergraduates misplaced the power to ship or obtain emails on lists run by HCS servers.

Winthrop House resident Tess C. Kelley ’23 mentioned she observed a difficulty with the e-mail server when she tried to ahead a message publicizing a scholar musical manufacturing to her home e-mail listing.

“I didn’t actually discover I wasn’t getting forwarded emails anymore — I wasn’t getting list-serv emails — till that occurred,” mentioned Kelley, a Crimson journal editor.

Lauren L. Zhang ’24, co-director of Harvard Minuet, mentioned she first realized she was unable to ship or obtain emails final week.

“It’s simply been an enormous headache for coordinating conferences and journeys, and the factor is, we didn’t get an error message straightaway,” mentioned Zhang, an inactive Crimson information editor. “The error message in all probability got here in two days later.”

Kristin B. King ’23-’24, president of the Harvard Curling Club, mentioned they first observed issues with the membership’s e-mail listing round mid-February however didn’t obtain any error messages.

“People have been experiencing it on totally different timelines, however nobody’s had any kind of decision,” King mentioned. “The HCS web site is down, so I do not know learn how to contact them.”

“At this level, we’re in all probability simply gonna need to make a brand new e-mail listing, which is admittedly unlucky as a result of our earlier e-mail listing had all of our alumni donors,” King added. “To lose that community is an enormous downside for us.”

In 2017, HCS’s e-mail listing system faced scrutiny when The Crimson reported that over 1.4 million emails, together with monetary info and grades, saved on their servers had been publically out there.

Over the previous few years, sustaining e-mail lists has been the “largest supply of stress” for HCS management and tech groups, Cooper wrote.

Cooper wrote HCS doesn’t know when the problem can be fastened, although they hope to supply membership leaders with “another technique of communication” if the issue shouldn’t be resolved inside two weeks. He added that HCS is wanting into transferring mailing listing tasks to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences or Harvard University Information Technology.

“We apologize for the inconveniences that this subject has precipitated for the higher group, and we respect everybody’s persistence,” he wrote.

—Staff author Vivi E. Lu may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @vivielu_.

—Staff author Leah J. Teichholtz may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @LeahTeichholtz.