Re: Email Forwarding

["Stanclift, Michael" <michael.stanclift () ROCKHURST EDU>]

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