The e-mail sent to UW-Madison students informing them of the April 21 date of football ticket sales missed many students' inboxes because of the large size of the university's student listserv, according to the athletic department.
Vince Sweeney, senior associate athletic director for external relations, said the recipient list was so large the e-mail needed to be sent out by sections of addresses.
This staggered sending of the e-mail prevented the system from becoming overloaded, according to Sweeney, but may have resulted in leaving out some e-mail addresses.
As a result, many students were not aware of the date the tickets were supposed to go on sale, and the ticketes were sold out by April 24.
The Athletic Ticket Office addressed the e-mail to nearly 40,000 students, according to Sweeney.
Although some UW-Madison students were they could not get football season tickets, e-mail was not the only way in which they could have found out about tickets going on sale, Sweeney stressed.
He maintained the notification ""wasn't all reliant upon e-mail, and never has been,"" and reiterated the Athletic Ticket Office made the information available via chalking, signs and multiple announcements at the spring football game.
""On our website, as early as March 14, we had information about student tickets on sale,"" Sweeney said.
Sweeney also said approximately 6,000 students bought tickets who did not receive the e-mail, so ""somehow the plan was effective.""
Additionally, not all students pay attention to every e-mail they receive, according to Sweeney.
""Typically about 40 percent of people actually open the e-mail,"" he said.
Sweeney said Athletic Ticket Office employees feel ""terrible"" the e-mail was not received by all students and plan to find a solution for future years.
""The ineffectiveness of our e-mail is a problem, and we are looking to see what if anything can be done,"" he said.
According to Brian Rust, communications manager for UW-Madison's Department of Information Technology, the Athletic Ticket Office must get permission from UW-Madison administration to send mass e-mails and then provide DoIT with the e-mail and the list of addresses.
""Once they do that, they can just give us a formal request to do a mass e-mailing,"" Rust said. ""They give us the e-mail, we send it out.""
