Call Kurtis: College Professor's Unusual Email Problem Created Hassles For 4 Years

A Modesto college professor has an usual problem. Whenever she gets emailed, the sender gets a response, saying it didn't go through.

With hundreds of students affected, she called Kurtis.

The professor has been dealing with this for four years. No doubt, people who email her are frustrated thinking the message didn't go through. We've learned this entire problem is tied to her prior phone.

Modesto Junior College professor, Michele Monlux, knows her stuff when it comes to anatomy and physiology.
But when it comes to her emails, she's stumped.

"When I send emails to people... students, businesses, friends, what happens is sometimes, they receive an email that says this message was undeliverable," said Michele.

The emails read "delivery status notification (failure)" from "postmaster@sprint.blackberry.net." But she's got an iPhone and hasn't had a Blackberry for four years.

Students, like Erica Robles, think their emails to Michele aren't going through.

"Sometimes you think oh, I have to resend it, it's either mine or it's hers and you have to resend. It gets confusing," said Erica.

A big problem for Michele, who gets 150 new students every semester.

"They think they've done something wrong. They got the wrong email address for me or somehow, I'm not responding to them," said Michele.

Michele says Sprint and her school's IT department couldn't figure it out.

We reached out to Sprint. They told us it's not them, check with Blackberry.

Blackberry says it's not them either.

So we then spoke with the school's IT department, which realized it was their fault. They forgot about what's called a forwarding rule they set up on her old Blackberry account.

What's that mean?

"The school set that rule up on the server and pretty much forgot about it," said Mike Parks, CBS13 IT manager.

Parks says the school never disabled forwarding emails to her Blackberry when she got rid of her phone.

"It's not at the client level, it's at the server level, so she wouldn't have been able to fix it herself," said Parks.

After we got involved, the school's IT department finally fixed it and from now on, Michele's students won't get these confusing emails.

"I would be so happy," said Michele.

So far, Michele tells us her emails have been working fine, for the first time in four years!