Several students sent a slew of spam emails to all PAUSD student and staff accounts on the district’s Adobe Creative Cloud email group at 8:15 p.m on Oct. 25. According to a statement released by the district, the spam was caused by a misconfiguration in a Google Group that assigns Adobe Creative Cloud licenses to PAUSD accounts. 

“The email feature was accidentally enabled for the group,” the district stated. “One of our students found the address, which started the storm of emails and replies.”

PAUSD’s tech team is working to remedy the issue, reporting that they disabled the “email all” feature that allowed the emails to be sent in the first place. Derek Moore, PAUSD’s Chief Technology Officer, said he is working to remove the spam emails from PAUSD member inboxes.

“(The feature) has been disabled,” Moore said. “Our team is working (on) removing the messages from mailboxes. If you want to do this yourself, simply delete the messages.”

While the messages did clog up some mailboxes, senior Nadav Sternheim said the emails didn’t disturb him and he instead found them entertaining. 

“I thought it was pretty funny, reading through those emails,” Sternheim said. “I was just concerned for the people (who) wrote some less school-appropriate stuff in the emails, but I thought it was entertaining overall.”