Recently, commuter students at Cornerstone opened up their school e-mail account to find huge amounts of mail from other commuters.

These e-mails consisted of political opinions, safety tips and many complaints about the large amount of e-mails they were receiving.

All of these mass e-mails started on Oct. 23 when John Paul Wohlscheid, a senior, got a hold of the list of every single commuter at CU from an e-mail from Amy Boyer, a sophomore who is the commuter assistant.

Boyer said she compiled a list of all of the commuters in an e-mail for a commuter event. However, she left all of the names visible to the recipients not realizing the consequences.

In addition to Wohlscheid sending out the initial e-mail, Matthew Stone, who claimed to be the new intern for commuters, contributed to the e-mails, introducing himself and giving safety tips for the weather that day.

However, when Boyer heard Stone’s name, she had no idea who he was.

“I’ve never met him,” Boyer said.

Wohlscheid initiated the e-mails by sending a message talking about the elections and his views of the issues.

His e-mail addressed the issue of abortion and said it was the only important issue in the elections. Wohlscheid said he sent out the e-mail because “abortion is so important that it needs to be ended, and I felt like I needed to say something.”

“Souls that God created are being destroyed,” Wohlscheid said. “It’s worse than the sin of Sodom it’s so great and evil. God’s a loving and good God, but he’s also a just God and can only take something so long.”

If he had to do it over again, Wohlscheid said he would still send out the e-mail because he thinks “abortion is such an important topic. It needs to be talked about more.”

However, Cornerstone bans mass e-mails.

Daniel Goodemoot, director of Information Systems, said there are several reasons for the ban. He said they are simply unnecessary traffic.

“Most people don’t like [mass e-mails], and they slow down the system,” Goodemoot said.

“It creates a problematic situation when our students receive an e-mail and multiple e-mails from someone they don’t know,” said Katie Azkoul, assistant director of commuter life & student activities, about the reason mass e-mails are banned.

Goodemoot and Azkoul both said there are better ways of communicating to large amounts of people. Some of these ways included the CUBE, Facebook, student discussion boards and advertisements or posters.

Neither Goodemoot, Azkoul, nor Boyer had a problem with political discussions over the network. They just did not want discussions being started with people who had not chosen first to participate in the conversation.

“If you have a discussion, it should be understood between the people. People should have a choice,” Boyer said.

“There are appropriate ways to discuss [politics],” Goodemoot said. He said talking about politics is healthy and good, but not through mass e-mails.

As a non-profit college, CU cannot endorse any candidate or party, Azkoul said.

“Even if we [did] have a political candidate come in, we’d have to present the other view,” Azkoul said.

However, Goodemoot said this should not prevent people from discussing politics as long as it is done in a healthy way through the right mode of communication.

To prevent mass e-mails from being sent out again among the commuters, Goodemoot said he warned people about mass e-mails. He said something like this occurs almost every year, but it is good to stop it as soon as possible.

Azkoul also said she will be the only one e-mailing commuters from now on using the blind copy tool so that students cannot see the other recipients.