As was already cleared by the MIT administration, the rally was in no way to promote any particular candidate or political party, merely to encourage members of the MIT community to take a particular look at the Institute itself, and how they can personally get involved to make sure that the MIT and greater community in which they live is the best one possible. Specifically, it was to encourage MIT students to register to vote. As is clear already, MIT and the Cambridge and Boston governments are often at odds. As institutions, they each have very different interests they wish to promote. This is in violation of Athena Rules of Use.
Electronic mail is a fast, convenient form of communication.
But this ability to send messages to many people also makes it easy to misuse the system. When a user sends out an announcement to a huge list of recipients, the mail servers get overloaded, disks fill up, and staff intervention is required. The overall result is a degradation of service for all users. These considerations apply to the Zephyr service as well. Zephyr is a central service involving thousands of transactions daily.