Email Forwarding Policy

 

Longstanding Enrollment Services policy identifies College email as the “official communication channel.” No blanket forwarding of College email to off-campus accounts is permitted for faculty and staff.

 

A faculty member using their @purchase.edu address is clearly identifying themselves as a member of the College community on official business. In contrast, Floater@aol.com sounds like poo in the pool, and is likely to end up ignored and deleted (that is/was an actual faculty member’s off-site email address.)

 

All faculty email addresses published on our public-facing website are their official purchase.edu addresses.

 

We all have off-site addresses, but we don’t publish those, and we should all be using our official college accounts for official business.

 

In the course of investigating an incident we discovered someone who set up automatic forwarding of all messages to an external account. That is dangerous since email (despite all our warnings) sometimes contains personal, private, and sensitive information about students or about college operations. Blanket forwarding also puts official records beyond the reach of legal discovery in the event of an HR investigation.  

 

College accounts are for College business – personal accounts are for personal business. Our policies and recommendations cannot contradict or even muddy that basic distinction.

 

Once the automatic forwarding was identified, we looked to see how many people had set up forwarding rules.  Out of 1,000 employees, only 39 individuals were identified as having automatic forwarding. Out of those 39 people, only 25 are faculty – and almost all of those are Adjuncts.

 

Each of the 39 was individually notified in Mid-July that the forwarding rule would be disabled. Email messages can still be individually forwarded as necessary – only automatic blanket forwarding was disabled.