The Weekly Wrap: January 28, 2024

I don't always get along with my University's Office of Information Technology (OIT). What they do is incredibly important but they are understaffed in "doers" and overstaffed in management. (There is literally one manager for every tech. There are only three techs. It's bonkers.) That means a lot of things go wrong and fixes aren't happening.

Like many organizations, our University deals with a lot of spam email and phishing attempts. OIT has tried various ways to help mitigate this issue. The first attempt was sending an email for every externally sent message that said "The next email is from an external source. Proceed with caution." Not only did it double the amount of email we got, but it didn't catch any of the phishing that came from compromised internal emails. That "fix" lasted all of the day.

Next, they started marking all externally sent emails with [EXTERNAL]. This is annoying and makes it hard to read subject lines, but I can ignore it.

Then, since many spam/phishs were still getting through, they instituted a quarantine system. This means that any email a Microsoft AI deems as suspicious gets shunted to a folder off our email system that we have to review later. I've found speaking proposal acceptances and other REALLY important material gets caught. (I can guarantee you our University is losing grant opportunities because of this.) We get one notification a day if there is material for us to review. It's a pain and not intuitive at all about how to mark something as safe. AND we're still getting all the internal spam and phishing attempts so it's not actually fixing anything.

As the outreach librarian, this means everything I send out through our email vendor is ending up in quarantine. (Not to mention our automatic account notifications AND our University's advising system emails are getting caught.) My open rate has plummeted to less than 3%. I asked for our vendor to be added to the safe list but was told that the "fix" would be for individual people to add us to their safe senders list... BUT THEY DON'T KNOW THESE EMAILS ARE COMING IN THE FIRST PLACE. I asked several times for these materials to be added to the safe senders list.

Then, this week, I was sending out emails to every individual faculty member. This is the biggest ROI outreach I do. It's a lot of work, but I get a noticeable increase faculty communication and requests for library services out of it. I do this each semester. I use a form message but the attachments and number of recipients varies with each email. In past semesters, I've completed this without issue. This week, my email address was marked as spam. About halfway through I started getting bounce-backs saying my account was locked. That meant I could not send out ANY email at all.

ARRRRGH!

I put in a ticket with OIT and our director escalated the issue. Luckily, I was back to work in a few hours. AND since I explained (yet again) what I do for my job they finally added my work email AND our vendor platform as safe senders for bulk messages.

Fingers crossed this fight with OIT is finally over.

What's aggravated you at work lately?

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• Excellent Long Read: Finding their names. [Dagbladet]
• Do you need to react to that? [Hedger Humor]
• NASA finally got to the full asteroid sample. [Gizmodo]
• When to send a work email. [HBR]
• Understanding ancient, old, and new world wine. [Wine Folly]

• Some times I love Planet Money for the content. Some times I love it for the structure. This was an amusing listen because the hosts clearly had some fun. [Planet Money]
• The science of honeyguide birds. [Short Wave]
• What you remember might not have happened. [Hidden Brain]
• How they secretly funded Oppenheimer - the scientist, not the movie. [The Daily]
• We should make an effort to get to know our neighbors. [How to Keep Time]
• A spotlight episode on Black entrepreneurs. [The Kitchen Sisters Present]

• The algorithm wins with this recommendation. [@_andi_rae_]
• We tossed on Lift because it looked like a high-tech heist film. It was exactly that. The cast was full of interesting characters and headed by Kevin Hart. It was amusing, but this was the kind of movie that seemed more about the aesthetics of being a high-tech film than actual plot or narrative. [Netflix]
• The husband put on Bank of Dave as a background watch simply because it looked "fine." This movie is semi based on real life. It follows a guy in a working class British town who wants to start a bank to help his community. Cue the clashes with the British class system. It might be titled for Dave but it was more about the lawyer who does the paperwork than Dave. This film sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. They strayed far from the actual history, but it was still a good watch. [Netflix]

• I try to mix up what proteins we eat each week. For our seafood pick, I went with honey garlic shrimp stir fry. This one is pretty fast to throw together but it can take some time for the sauce to cook down. We served the shrimp over with rice and roasted frozen broccoli. [Tasty]
• The husband said he was craving nachos so I made turkey taco skillet. I love a good one pan dish. I accidentally used the can of tomatoes in another recipe so I subbed in some salsa. That worked just fine. I picked up a bag of blue corn tortilla chips to go with this. They kept breaking which is always annoying. If you use chips, go with a thicker variety. [Budget Bytes]