Spam e-mail killed neighborhood service

Prairienet Community Network has been forced to end its community-based e-mail and mailing-list hosting services as of Dec. 31. This is a tremendous loss to the many individuals and organizations who depended upon the service based in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. As coordinators of the Southeast Urbana Neighborhood Association, we set up our e-mail listserv through Prairienet several years ago to provide an affordable, efficient way for our members to communicate with one another. We soon came to recognize that these listservs also help increase civic engagement, strengthen community networks and inform citizens about local issues and events.

According to Prairienet's Web site, 99 percent of all e-mail is spam mail. Prairienet was overwhelmed by the volume of junk e-mail; efforts to negotiate a contract between the University of Illinois and an affordable commercial spam filter vendor were not successful. As a result, the community has lost a valuable public service.