After the Fall 2023 semester, Dickinson students and employees have seen an increase in spam emails. Ranging from trying to sell a piano to advertising an internship you should definitely apply for, the emails have definitely piled up since winter break.

However, the spam emails interacting with the Dickinson community have started to take inspiration from other websites in a crude manner. Similar to spam accounts in the comments of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, these emails have been posting suggestive content in their messages. One of these messages, impersonating a biology professor, said “P░U░S░S░Y░O░N░M░O░O░D░L░E,” linking to a webpage that harvested personal information of those who clicked on it.

“I was just genuinely curious what would happen if I clicked the link,” said a sophomore who wished to be quoted anonymously, so as not to air out their porn addiction to the entire campus. They went on to say “I didn’t think there would actually be pussy on Moodle, but I was still curious to see what was in the link.”

After this message was sent to many members of the Dickinson community, a follow-up message was sent by the Help Desk. They advised people to “be wary of messages that claim to be from Dickinson senders but supposedly link to illicit content, which is actually malware.”

These inappropriate scams have continued since winter break, and are not only contained to external accounts. Emails with attractive people as the profile images have been asking students for contact information to get in touch to “meet up.” In actuality, these personal numbers and emails are being collected so that donation requests can be sent to soon-to-be graduated students and their contacts.

“Alumni donations are very important for Dickinson to continue as an institution,” said one former member of the College Advancement staff who was fired for organizing the messaging campaign. “If we can get the contact lists of a few horny students to have a wider network to fundraise from, I don’t see the issue there,” they went on to say.

The Help Desk has been brainstorming ways to reduce these messages going forward. “We have considered going with an extreme route by simply getting rid of email at Dickinson,” they explained to The Drinkinsonian in an interview. They went on to say “Generally, since it’s just so stressful to respond to email, we feel that encouraging students to send letters by passenger pigeon or communicate via Batsignal will be more effective and better mentally for the campus community.”