Dealing with Departmental Email Contact Addresses and Staff Changes

Using a small majordomo mailing list is a good option for keeping your department's contact address current, regardless of staff changes

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu

If those contact addresses are individual email accounts, problems can arise when employees' duties change, or when employees change jobs, fall ill and are away for a protracted period of time, or are otherwise unable to handle the mail that's coming into their account.

What Kinds of Problems Can Arise?

To understand why such situations can be a problem, let's consider four scenarios and how the university's Acceptable Use Policy and its Addendum might apply (to review the Acceptable Use Policy and the Addendum, see http://cc.uoregon.edu/policy/acceptable_use.html and http://cc.uoregon.edu/policy/aup_addend.html ):

• Users may not share the password to their account (AUP: "Sharing of Accounts or Lab Passes Prohibited"). Thus, it would be inappropriate for you to tell someone else your password so that they could log in to your account while you're traveling or are otherwise unavailable.

• When UO employees are no longer employed by the university, their email accounts are terminated (with the exception of retirees, employees who are also students, and so on. See http://hr.uoregon.edu/benefits/aretsrvcs.html and http://hr.uoregon.edu/benefits/cretsrvcs.html). If those defunct email addresses have been widely publicized in a flyer or other material, anyone trying to contact a program via those addresses may be frustrated when their email is returned as undeliverable.

• When university employees change jobs or change to student-only status, if their personal account has been used as a departmental contact address they will likely continue to receive email for their old job, even though they are no longer employed in that role. This can be a tremendous nuisance for both the department and the former employee.

• Under the Acceptable Use Policy, while employees are allowed to "use academic computing resources to learn, explore and grow as part of [his/her] education or employment at the University" (AUP Addendum: "Appropriate Use of Electronic Information Systems"), that same document makes it clear that "the University does clearly own, control, or have a custodial relationship with respect to certain classes of information stored on its electronic information systems, including, but not limited to [...] electronic messages pertaining to University planning, budgeting, operations, governance and deliberative activities." (AUP Addendum: "Ownership of Systems and Information").

Because of this, if critical departmental communications are being sent to your personal account and you are unavailable for an extended period of time, it may be necessary for University Legal Counsel to authorize limited nonconsensual access to those communications for essential university business purposes. Such requests are awkward for all involved, and we'd like to minimize them or avoid them altogether.

How Should Departmental Email Contact Addresses Be Handled?

For departmental point-of-contact email addresses, our recommendation is that departments consider setting up a small majordomo mailing list, using that mailing list as the departmental point of contact instead of using a personal account.

One key point: unlike most mailing lists, which allow virtually anyone to join, a departmental point-of-contact mailing list should be configured so that any attempt to subscribe is referred to the list owner, thereby ensuring that only authorized users can see mail sent to that list. (Information on creating and managing a majordomo mailing list can be found at http://lists.uoregon.edu/manage.html )

To understand how using a mailing list can help ensure continuity of departmental email access and eliminate problems, consider the following:

• More than one person can receive mail sent to the departmental address (for example, the normal departmental office coordinator plus that person's backup).
  
  
• If someone who is currently on the list changes jobs, gets sick, or goes on leave, that person can simply be removed from the list. When someone new joins the department, or the original employee returns, they can easily be (re)-added.
• Using a mailing list can also be helpful when it comes to organizing or filtering mail you receive, so that high priority mail can be handled first, then other mail dealt with as time permits.
• Using a mailing list makes it easy for a supervisor to monitor responses to ensure that questions are being handled, and handled appropriately.
  • There are some minor disadvantages to using a small majordomo mailing list as a departmental point of contact address:
  • The address itself will be somewhat long (i.e., its suffix will be @lists.uoregon.edu, rather than simply @uoregon.edu). There's no inherent problem with this, it's just that some people may not like the additional text.
    
    
• The people on the list need to remember to reply to the list as well as the person asking a question or asking for information; failure to do this may result in multiple responses to a single question.
  
  
• A UO user (such as the department head) needs to officially own and administer the list.

Those limitations notwithstanding, use of a small private mailing list for departmental points of contact can really eliminate a lot of issues when it comes to handling routine day-to-day department business via email.

If you handle mail for a UO department and have questions about this topic, feel free to get in touch with me, Joe St Sauver (joe@uoregon.edu). Alternatively, for general majordomo mailing list questions, please email listmaster@lists.uoregon.edu.