Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Email Forwarding
From: "Stanclift, Michael" <michael.stanclift () ROCKHURST EDU>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:48:11 -0500
1. We do internal forwards, usually when someone is on extended absence or leaves and their messages need to be forwarded to a manager, co-worker, replacement, etc. 2. Student email is hosted by Microsoft Exchange Labs, we do not place any restriction on their ability to forward their messages to another email account to allow their EL account to POP'd into by another service like Gmail. We consider student email to be their messages to do with as they please. Faculty used to be allowed to forward messages although it was not widely used. (Maybe <10%) -- We had to manually setup the forward for them but we discontinued the entire practice when we switched to Exchange 2007 in March. Staff have never been permitted to forward their mail, and don't really recall anyone ever asking to. Most (if not all) of our staff work on campus and make extensive use of Exchange contact/calendar and public folders, so using some other system is not really worth it. I think most of our staff prefer to keep work and private email separate. 3. From a technical perspective, we don't like forwarding messages because of the dreaded "Forward to this box, and that box forwards it back to the sender" loop. Also, it was taking a considerable about of administrative overhead to manage even the small amount of forwards we had for faculty. Then we would get issues where someone claimed to have sent a message to someone, but the other person was forwarding their box and claimed they never got it. Then there was the issue where a faculty member would not teach for a semester, come back, have changed their personal email address and not updated us, and then all those messages were routed into the ether. When it's all in the same system it's much easier to track where the message ended up. From a policy/security point of view, our office decided that with the level of private student information being exchanged over email (grades, student ID numbers, etc) it was best to keep that inside our system. Our view is that if a student exchanges information with a professor or staff member about their student records, etc, that that information should stay within our system and that they have an expectation that that information isn't going to end up on the servers outside of our control unless THEY want it to. Michael Stanclift Network Analyst Rockhurst University http://help.rockhurst.edu (816) 501-4231 Think before you print! -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Jay Graham Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 7:07 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Email Forwarding Folks, I know this comes up every once in a while on this group and I hate to bring it up again, I just want to get a quick read of the landscape and see if anything has changed over the past year. Q1: Do you allow forwarding of University email addresses internally and/or externally? (i.e. Allow username () pitt edu to forward to username () gmail com) Q2: Do you treat students any differently than Faculty and Staff? Q3: If you don't allow forwarding, is more a technical reason or security reason? Thanks, Jay Graham Lead Technologist CSSD Univesity of Pittsburgh
Current thread:
- Email Forwarding Jay Graham (Sep 21)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Email Forwarding Michael J. Wheeler (Sep 21)
- Re: Email Forwarding Patria, Patricia (Sep 22)
- Re: Email Forwarding Kenneth Arnold (Sep 22)
- Re: Email Forwarding Mike Patterson (Sep 22)
- Re: Email Forwarding Chris Steele (Sep 22)
- Re: Email Forwarding Stanclift, Michael (Sep 22)
- Re: Email Forwarding Valdis Kletnieks (Sep 22)