Confused City Officials and Employees use Coralsprings.com Email Address
| 02/22/02 8th Revision Update Latest update: Letter to the City Manager asking for a favor (Click here)
It’s bad enough dealing with the hundreds of emails a day that come from everywhere including Mortgage Scammers to Porn sites but this is the last straw. Being Spammed by the City is just plain unfair!. This is being done by employees, and public officials unknowingly (sometimes) as they continuously make the mistake of using the .com instead of the .org. For example: The city email address should be howard@coralsprings.org. Some people in the city use the email address howard@coralsprings.com instead (wrong!). All email that has coralsprings.com after the ‘@’ symbol in an email address goes to our website. Last year alone , we received more than 7500 emails sent to us for city related business. It’s quite natural for them to use coralsprings.com in their email address since our website is read more often by the city employees and public officials than their own. Coralsprings.com established itself as a significant website in Coral Springs 2 years ago. At that time the city was using an obscure domain name like www.ci.coralsprings.fl.br.whocares.gov . They had owned the coralsprings.org (pronounced as coralsprings.orgy and hereinafter called ‘Orgy’) but had not implemented it. Since we pissed them off, they decided that they should use Orgy. To advertise their dissatisfaction with us they placed the Orgy on the back of their vehicles. Now, on every police car and city truck you see Orgy. This only increased the hits to our website since no one pays attention to Orgy and go to the coralsprings.com anyway. However, with the change came the confusion. We started receiving sensitive email from various departments and enjoyed reading them. It gave us a good pulse on what was going on. We battled with ourselves to determine whether or not we should tell the city that they are sending all this great stuff to us!. After much laughter, we emailed the city and told them to stop using the Orgy, it’s too confusing. They simply laughed and (quoting the words of a City Commissioner) “what for, no one goes to your site anyway” . We said that it would be our pleasure to host the city’s email for a small charge and end the confusion. “Pay you ?” said a commissioner. “What for?” . At that point it was our opinion that any email that we received was fair game and we could do what we want with it, including the To-Do list received just recently ( Click here for this one). But it doesn’t stop. We get love letters, and porn mail that was supposed to go to people in the city. We get subscription renewal notices, passwords, confirmation of vacations, and even a love letter that went to a certain politician living in this city (It was very hot!!). How about the insurance quotes, the meeting notifications, and sometimes strategy planning? Aside from the stuff received that was supposed to go to the city, we also get plenty of stuff from people who are complaining about one thing or another. One person thought that this was the city’s website and wrote a nasty email to the Mayor. We wrote back (thinking we were helping the Mayor out) telling him to move to another city and take all of his family with him. Boy was he mad. We can’t even print what he said. How about Sam Goren, the city attorney? He sent out a great email on the Enron Plant stuff (click here) to us. Then there’s the guy in the city that likes Astrology or the one that plays the Group Lotto sites. There are a whole bunch that play the casinos online and others that look at the web cams of girls in college. Is this what government does with their time? So many people doing so many great things with the taxpayers money. With all of the time on their hands wasting at the smut in life, maybe they should have gotten the email address straight the first time! How about the Color Laser printer quote that they got from PC University Distributors Inc, totaling more than $9,000? (Click here to see it) . It’s good to see that we are spending the money wisely (by the way ..you can get an Inkjet printer for a lot less) . This is the kind of information that everyone should see. That’s why they tell all of these people to send it to us. The City hides behind a bogus disclaimer that they put on the bottom of every email that says: ====== CITY OF CORAL SPRINGS ===== Listen, this is not like opening up someone’s postal mail. You send it to us, it’s fair game. Remember, by sending it to Coralsprings.com you are addressing it to us. Can you imagine what the Sun Sentinel would do with all this stuff? Forget about notifying the system manager at the city, he is not listed in the email. Besides we already notified the city commissioners, the manager, the mayor, and anyone else we could find on the list. We told them of the ‘Sensitive’ emails that we are receiving, and we are still receiving them…Like the memorandum sent to Chief Arigo (click here). There is also the less sensitive ‘Rubbermaid’ inquiry by an employee clearly on ‘city’ time. (Click here). You have to ask yourself who is in charge at the city that allows such flagrant abuses during business hours. How is it possible that people can be so stupid as to use the internet during business hours and yet make a big mistake in their email return addresses. We even have an obscene picture that someone asked to have sent to them concerning a horse and a body appendage (figure this one out). But…Enough is enough. We are tired of being the dumping ground of every one in the city that subscribes to one thing or the other, and that doesn’t take their time to make sure their email address is correct. With the 100’s of emails being sent to us , it is taking a lot of time and energy to read and delete them. It also takes space on our server. So how long is this going to continue? Maybe, if we embarrass them they will take the appropriate measures to tell everyone in the city government not to use the .com email address. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll keep the whole thing quiet and not tell anyone. Maybe not. If they are going to use the com instead of the Orgy, at least pay us for our time and effort. Perhaps they want to share everything with everyone in the class! UPDATE 01/14/02 Rather than fixing their systems, sources tell us that City of Coral Springs is currently contemplating obtaining a court order to stop us from displaying email addressed to us. It is quite obvious that this article has provided some irritation (and some amusement) to the City. They still don’t get it. The issue has nothing to do with us. It has to do with them. All they have to do is stop the email being sent to us. They can do that by changing their website name to www.ci.coral-springs.fl.br.gov . Just like it used to be before. That is before we came to town and they got jealous. Once they do it, we would have to find other items to write about instead of the email that we received like this one that was sent to us for an employee of the city: Hi (name withheld) We love you too Mom! And how about this Cirque Du Soleil ticket confirmation that was sent to us for another city employee: Subject: FW: Confirmation – Ticket purchase CIRQUE DU SOLEIL – MIAMI We could have done a lot with this one. For instance we could have
We decided that it would not be a nice thing to do to someone. So the email keeps pouring in. Visit this article again in the near future as we continuously update its content. UPDATE 01/23/02 Additional sources indicate that the higher ups in the city are livid about our exposing sensitive email on our website. We have given much thought to this and feel if they didn’t want us to see it they should address it properly. The latest email is a memo sent to various legal advisors and Commissioner Alan Polin. This email was sent to not one but 2 coralsprings.com addresses. They sent 7 copies the same email to both the addresses for a total of 14 emails. Come on guys….enough with this nonsense. Stop Spamming us. Get it right! Click here to view the memorandum sent to Commissioner Alan Polin UPDATE 02/05/02 We resisted up until now in posting an email that was received that was sent to a politician but ended up in our mailbox. Of course I protected the names of the people involved and we changed the date and time it was sent so that it can’t be traced by anyone. Click Here to see it.
UPDATE 02/22/02 Another letter, this time to the City Manager asking him for a favor….Click here to see it.
Comments? email them to : editor@www.rfcj.com Comments Received: Obviously the people who have responded may not have shared my general view on the subject. Getting the emails is funny, posting them is funnier, but you should make sure that every email has the identifying faetures removed. Also here’s and idea – send the email to the city of Coral Springs – find out the administrator email and program it into your address book. I was amused – people we are living in a society today where one instance can crumble lives and intsitutions; take a moment to enjoy the purity of the act, it’s like Leno’s headlines. I would not enjoy it if it happened to me but when you send internal emails – i would make sure of the address and as far as oersonal mail going through company venues – protect yourself – Hotmail is free. –M.G. Now we know why the city commissioners don’t like you. Keep up the good work! -S.T.Hello, I just read your story about receiving email that should have been addrssed to coralsprings.org but is addressed to .com (you) instead. First, If you REALLY did want to STOP receiving these, and why would you, all you have to do is CONFIGURE your email server software to REJECT any email addressed to a user that is NOT one of your users. So unless you had a real user ID of gad then email addressed to xxx@www.rfcj.com would get rejected. Second, employees are NOT Slaves. They have lives too. So if they spend a few minutes creating and reading personal email so what, leave them alone. Most city workers earn their pay. Have you ever made or taken a personal phone call while on the job. Who cares. – N.O. (editor: Do we REALLY want to STOP receiving the emails? Obviously you have missed the point of the article. Boy…some people have no sense of humor 🙂 I HONESTLY BELIEVE THAT TO MAKE FUN OF THESE PEOPLE THE WAY IT IS DONE IS SO DISTASTEFUL, IT MAKES ME SICK. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNIER THAN TOM JICHA, THE REPORTER IN THE SUN SENTINEL? I FIND HIM TO BE QUITE SARCASTIC BUT NOT QUITE CRUEL. YOU’RE MAKING PUBLIC YOUR WARPED OPINION OF THESE CALLS FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN SHAKEN UP SO BADLY BY WHAT THE WORLD HAS BEEN THRU IS TOTALLY OUT OF LINE. JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T NAME NAMES, DOESN’T MEAN THESE PEOPLE DON’T FEEL LIKE FOOLS BY CALLING THE POLICE DEPT AND BEING PUBLICLY RIDICULED ON THE INTERNET. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.I love it! Please show us more, especially the juicy stuff. If you want them to get the address right and reduce your email I think you need to embarrass them. Its amazing to me the attitude some of these commissioners have. I sure hope some one runs against them in the next election. Personally, I’m ready for a change. Keep up the good work. I find your site a lot more interesting then “their site”. – L.N. Everyone knows that lots of people use work email for personal affairs, I do it and so does everyone else I know. I’ve received emails of the type you described at work, as well have sent them FROM work. How much time is spent hanging out at the water cooler? How much time is spent on cigarette breaks? I have NO INTEREST in reading personal emails from our great city’s employees and I am pissed off that you guys posted them. If it’s such a problem for you, why don’t YOU CHANGE YOUR WEB ADDRESS? If they really gave a shit, they would make sure to properly address email, wouldn’t they? I don’t agree with them, but don’t agree with you either and I don’t think it is necessary for you to bash them! L.N.: What are you ready for a change of? Is there ANYONE in a position of power that does NOT have an attitude??? Even with (and probably because of!) their attitudes, our city’s leaders are doing a wonderful job! You’re going to vote them out because you don’t like them?? Personality is not what got them elected! I love Coral Springs, it’s a great place to raise children, the schools are top notch, the parks are fun, and the programs are wonderful! If the people that make Coral Springs such a great place to live want to use email for personal use, that’s just fine by me and the taxes I pay! – Diane |
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