E-mail Access and Message Retention Policy
July 1, 2000 Version 1.0
1.0 Policy
The university's digital communications infrastructure provides the corporate means for rapid dissemination of official information to faculty, staff and students. Electronic messaging (e-mail) is an enabling application that facilitates the distribution of administrative and instructional information within the campus and to external users. In order for this application to perform reliably and cost effectively:
- All students, faculty and staff must be accessible through the university-selected e-mail applications. University Computing and Communications Services (UCCS), a unit of Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) will maintain the centralized directory of e-mail addresses.
- Electronic messages (and their attachments) will not be stored on institutional network devices for unlimited periods of time.
UCCS, as the manager of the institutional infrastructure, will establish and publish standards for acceptable storage periods and storage volumes. Changes to standards, when necessary, will be communicated to the university by UCCS.
College and departmental IT contacts will provide recommendations to UCCS for the development of standards and will be responsible for ensuring compliance with the standards by their respective users.
Instruction and assistance on local archiving and automated removal of e-mails will be developed and offered by college and departmental IT contacts in coordination with UCCS.
2.0 Purpose
The university depends on the availability and responsiveness of an e-mail environment for the normal conduct of university business. Increasingly, due to non-traditional methods of instruction, the mobile nature of the university community, and increased communications between faculty and students, reliance on e-mail has grown as well. The volume of messages in the GroupWise system increases by 1.2% per week and storage usage has increased by 85% in the last six months.
This policy recognizes this dependence and institutionalizes e-mail as an acceptable means of communicating administrative and instructional information. Additionally, limitation to university-selected applications simplifies support and interoperability issues.
The policy further recognizes that e-mail applications are the vehicle for the transmission of information but that they are not meant to serve as, or replace, other methods of electronic document storage.