The Editorial Board would like to take a second to call attention to the pet peeve of almost every SMU student: The excessive amounts of mass emails sent to us from random departments at SMU who can’t seem to get attention any other way.

We would also like to take a second to tell a specific person to stop doing this. We are talking to you, Patrick Hite. We know the Health Center is doing flu shots and believe one e-mail telling the student body is enough. We have received that e-mail more than once. Please stop telling us. That survey? The first time you emailed it to us we decided whether or not we’d like to participate. Now, is there a place on the survey we can express our sincere annoyance that we received the survey multiple times?

Here’s the deal, SMU. Allowing every department in the school to send out emails about things that the vast majority of the student body does not care about is inefficient and annoying. And when our email boxes are not that big in the first place, it doesn’t make sense to load them with things that most students will not pay attention to anyway.

Do you want us to take emails from the school seriously? Then take into consideration the fact that 99 percent of those emails are not serious. If I am a theater major, I most likely do not care about Guildhall. I probably will not attend their functions no matter how many times I am told about them. If I am a business major, I probably do not care about the speaker coming to campus from the anthropology department. I will not go…ever.

The first rule of attracting an audience is to identify your audience and the entire student body is usually not the audience.

It is simply not true that everyone will care about your “really exciting” event. Choose your email audiences wisely so your “important” messages aren’t subjected to mass, immediate deletion.

Here are two suggestions to fix this annoying problem:

1. Make all those who want to notify the student body of something send their emails to one person. Have that person bundle the emails and send them out in a larger email once a week.

2. Allow students to unsubscribe from lists they are uninterested in. Do not allow this option for emergency emails or emails of larger importance. Hint: The new video game in Guildhall is not of larger importance. Nor is the third notification about flu shots.

This is something the student body has been complaining about for a while. While we’d love to dedicate our editorial to larger problems instead of things that could have easily been fixed by a simple change in email settings, it turns out that the administration has not realized how ridiculously annoying this is.

Until then, here is a simple solution for students:

If you want to make sure you never receive emails from certain people, click on their email, then click on “actions” in the top right corner and a drop down box will pop up. Click on “create rule.” Then, click on “was received from.” Under “do the following” there is a drop down box. Click it, and select “move the message to folder.” Then select the folder you want it to be moved to. Junk mail? Trash? It’s up to you. At least you won’t receive the emails anymore.