As the lunch hour approached on Monday a line of students waiting to pick up their packages stretched past Mac’s. Karen Serbonich, manager of mail services at Ithaca College, stood outside the Philips Hall Post Office informing students that the emails from “PB e-mail test” were invalid, and they did not have packages.  

Serbonich said the system the post office uses to process packages is called Outlook Express. The vendor for the tracking system has upgraded some of the software so the system would use a different server to send out e-mail notifications to reach students more efficiently.

Between 10:30 a.m. and noon Monday, the new system was being tested on a student that works in mail services. The post office always maintains a two-month history of packages in the system before they archive them. All of the packages from the past two months were in the sent folder in the old system at the time, so the test e-mail went to all of those students who had received packages in the last two months, because the new system thought they had not been sent yet, Serbonich said.

“Almost 11,000 packages that came in the last two months, and those students all got another e-mail,” Serbonich said. “People started calling in saying they got 25 e-mails or 50 e-mails, and I had not idea what was going on.”

Serbonich called the maintenance team and asked them to shut down the system immediately to prevent more emails being sent. She said the old system either categorized the emails by alphabet or by the tracking number, but they are not sure the method it used to send the emails out, which is why some students received multiple emails and some did not receive any.  

Serbonich said a glitch like this has never happened before because this is the first time they are upgrading the system. She also said this should never happen again, as it was only a problem with the system upgrade.

“It was not a virus, nor was it spam,” Serbonich said. “It had no connection with the campus Webmail system, it was just a computer glitch.”

The upgraded software had originally worked so e-mails would be sent to the student immediately after a package was processed in the Mail Center, but Serbonich had asked the maintenance team to tweak the software so it would batch the e-mails. Then the e-mails would not be sent out to students until the packages had been received at the post office.  

“If students got the e-mail that their package was ready to be picked up in the post office when it wasn’t even here yet, it would cause even greater problems,” Serbonich said.  

In order to preempt the extremely long line of students, the post office put up signs on the door and out in the hall explaining that the emails from “PB Email Test” were invalid and only emails that came from IC Mail Services were actually valid. Serbonich said most of the students were relatively understanding about the situation.

“Some students even found it funny because they didn’t know why they would possibly get fifty packages,” Serbonich said.  

Sophomore Chris Zivalich lives in the Terraces and said getting the e-mail was incredibly inconvenient because he had to trek all the way down to the mail center for nothing.  

"It is usually very exciting to get these notifications because it mean you actually got something, and it is a big deal," Zivalich said.  "I had to take a break out of my really busy schedule to go to the other side of campus for something that wasn't even there. It was just very upsetting."

Sophomore Jackie Silver said she got two e-mails that were dated Oct. 1, but when she went down to the post office, the line was all the way to the bookstore, which deterred her from getting in line.  

"One of my friends told me that the e-mails were fake," she said. "I wonder how this could have happened and why no one knew about it."

Sophomore Molly Kilroy said she was concerned by the number of e-mails that she received and began to worry that someone had purchased packages with her information.   

"I was so confused by the e-mails because I wasn't expecting any packages," she said. "I got concerned that maybe someone had my card and had spent a lot of money. It was very scary."