At the present time no
decision has been made as to whether students should be discouraged from
forwarding their e-mail. Technically,
faculty, staff and students can establish “rules” via the Outlook client to
forward or redirect their e-mail to other addresses. The ability to establish rules is not
supported in the current version of the Web client (OWA) but is supported in
version 2003 which will be installed this summer (2004).
There are currently opposing
views as to whether students should forward their e-mail. Several faculty have
commented that it would be nice to be able to verify that a student actually
received an e-mail. In order to track
messages consistency, the message must be contained within the UNCW environment.
ITSD supports the discouragement of students forwarding their e-mail, for the following reasons:
Ř Collaboration environment (e.g. calendars, global address
list, access to public folders, etc.) lost for those that choose to forward
their e-mail.
Ř Impossible for Technology Assistance Center (TAC) to assist
with problems.
Ř E-mail cannot be tracked once it leaves UNCW systems.
This point becomes critical as the university moves toward the use of e-mail as
an official notification process with the phasing out of post office
boxes.
Ř E-mail may be lost if forwarding address is incorrect,
server is down, quota is full, etc. (UNCW provides for 10 MB of storage, most
ISP’s allow a 5 MB mailbox and “free” e-mail services (e.g. hotmail and yahoo)
have a 3 MB limit.