Purchase College Broadcast E-mail Policy
Email is a convenient way to communicate information to the campus community, and as a result there are many requests for campus-wide “broadcast” e-mails. However, the convenience of this method has to be balanced against the resources it consumes. These resources include the system administrator’s time, disk space, the load on the server, and, most importantly - the time and attention of the college community who receive the messages. With the increasing volume of mail received by everyone on campus, it is important that we avoid overuse of broadcast email that will diminish the effectiveness of this communications channel. It is also important that the messages we send are clear and accurate.
Who can request a campus-wide e-mail message?
- Any faculty or staff member at Purchase College can request that a campus-wide message be sent out by submitting a request to their Vice President or College Officer. Only the six VPs/Officers can authorize broadcast emails. Requests for broadcast messages that do not come from one of the six officers will be returned to their originator.
Who will receive a campus-wide e-mail message?
- Campus-wide messages can be sent to all campus-wide e-mail server users. This includes users of the campus Exchange mail servers only.
- Campus-wide messages CAN NOT be sent out to other e-mail servers or to external e-mail addresses.
- The request must specify the audience to receive the message. Broadcast messages can be sent to 1) all faculty 2) all staff, or 3) to all students. These three categories (and others such as residents by wing or students by division) can be combined as necessary to reach the desired audience.
- Deans/Directors of academic divisions have the ability to send messages to all students and/or faculty/staff within their division themselves.
What can be sent out in a campus-wide e-mail message?
- Campus-wide e-mails should be sent out to inform the campus of announcements, emergencies, or alerts that affect the entire campus, including service outages, campus closures, and policy changes.
- Campus-wide e-mails should be brief and to the point. Thousands of people will be reading this message – if it is not relevant to them, they will quickly begin disregarding future broadcast messages.
- Campus-wide e-mails must include a descriptive subject line.
- All campus-wide e-mail messages must be sent out in plain text. Messages that are received as word documents or as formatted text will be reformatted to plain text, or may be returned to the requestor for reformatting.
Should I use a Portal Announcement or send a campus-wide e-mail?
- There is an Announcements section on both the Student Portal and the Faculty/Staff portal. These announcements can be added by Content Managers within each office/academic division using the Web-based Content Management System (CMS).
- Campus events and non-emergency information that does not affect the entire campus should be posted to the Announcements section of the Portal Pages. All events should be posted to the Campus Calendar (also accessible through the CMS. Event and non-emergency messages should not be sent out in a campus-wide e-mail.
How do I submit a campus-wide e-mail request?
The procedure for e-mailing a campus-wide message from an Exchange Server account using Microsoft Outlook is as follows:
Compose the message and have your VP or College Officer approve it:
A. Open a new message by clicking on “File->New->Mail Message” in Outlook
B. The broadcast message request MUST include 6 Required components:
1. A descriptive subject for the message.
2. An expiration date for the message (users who do not view the message before this date will never see it – i.e. an event on a certain date that has already passed)
3. The source address to be used (all replies will go to this address), which Must be an Exchange account.
4. The target audience (faculty and staff / students / the entire campus)
5. The date the campus-wide message should be released (date or “ASAP”). (Note that except for emergencies, broadcast messages are only sent after 5PM when there is less load on the system)
6. The brief, plain text message you want sent out to the entire campus. Note on Graphics: Pictures can be included, but should be avoided unless there is a compelling reason. Messages larger than 50kb will be returned to their originator for reduction (graphics consume a large amount of disk space on the mail servers when sent to 10,000 people). CTS staff may be able to assist you with creating HTML email that reduces the size of the messages while increasing the use of graphics. The use of cheesy clip art is strongly discouraged in all cases.
C. Send the message to your VP/CFO/COO for their approval. The President, Vice President, CFO, or COO must approve the request and forward the message to “@CIS Network Operations”. CTS will only accept requests received directly from these six individuals. We cannot accept requests from others stating that they have received approval.
Messages that do not meet all of the above criteria will be returned to the requestor.
The System Administrators will send the message out to the requested audience.
Receipt of the campus-wide message in your Exchange mailbox is your confirmation that the message was sent.
Broadcast messages should also be posted to the “Announcements” section on the Student and Faculty/Staff Portal pages. For additional Campus Communication Options, see
If you have any questions about campus-wide e-mails, please call the CTS Helpdesk at x6465.
(revised October 2006)