In this day and age most people with computers at home prefer to communicate by e-mail. It’s quicker, convenient and recipients can read your e-mail when it’s convenient for them. The San Leandro School District, however, makes e-mailing teachers and administrators almost impossible. They use a spam filtering system which by default sends most messages from certain domains (including gmail.com, but also private domains) straight to the spam folder. If the recipient doesn’t check their spam folder – and, personally, I rarely check mine -, they’ll never see it. If you’re lucky, they may see it a day after you sent it.
Recipients, of course, can “white list” specific addresses, but often they don’t. I keep receiving rejection notices from the Superintendent’s e-mail account, for example (of course, maybe she just doesn’t want to hear from me :-). I have been complaining of this problem for years, pretty much since my daughter started Kindergaden five years ago. They still haven’t fixed it. And they won’t. They say that teachers otherwise get overwhelmed by spam – yet, that’s a problem we all face and most of us are able to manage by using one of the many filters out there that can more selectively separate legitimate mail from spam. I still don’t understand why the School District doesn’t do this. Unless, of course, they don’t really want to hear from you and me 🙂