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Overview
The Student, Faculty, and Staff handbooks provide information regarding the use of technology resources on campus. Please consult those references if you have a question regarding the appropriate use of college email resources. The following best practices provide guidelines to improve the use and effectiveness of email on campus:
Email Distribution Groups
The college manages distribution groups to send emails to a number of individuals like offices, departments, groups of students, faculty, and staff. Mail distribution groups can be setup through our Active Directory system and maintained by the group owner. To request a group, send an email to the ITS Service Desk with the name of the group and a list of the email addresses to be included in the group. ITS will work with the requester to establish the group and let them maintain the list when changes occur.
Sending to College-Wide Distribution Groups
There are three large distribution groups for email in our system: Faculty, Staff and Students. If you are a member of one of these groups, you can by default send to the whole group. For instance, if you are a member of the R-MC Staff group you can reply all to a staff@rmc.edu email and it will go to everyone, however, that same member will not be able to send an email to Faculty@rmc.edu from outside that group.
These groups are managed by:
- Faculty@rmc.edu, the owner is the Provost
- Staff@rmc.edu, the owner is the VP of Administration and Finance
- Students@rmc.edu, the owner is the VP and Dean of Students and Residence Life
Anyone who would like to send to the college-wide distribution groups in which they are not already a member, must receive approval from the appropriate owner. After receiving approval, please forward a copy of the approval along with the request to be granted the ability to send to one or more of the college-wide distribution groups.
ITS enforces using the Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc) option when sending to large distribution groups like Faculty, Staff, and Students. This keeps the addresses in the list private and eliminates confusion when scheduling meetings and working with the large groups of community members. It also prevents "reply all" when replying which is what most cell phone email applications default to. Please see our directions for using Bcc: when sending to groups where this rule is enforced.
Forwarding of R-MC Email to External Accounts
Automatic forwarding all of your R-MC email to other email systems, like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. may be a convenient feature for users but it is even more convenient for threat actors who commonly use email forwarding rules to access mailboxes and leak data. Initial access is often gained through phishing and using legacy email protocols to evade multi-factor authentication. Threat actors use email forwarding rules to automate and scale attacks, stealing data from the most valuable assets. For this reason, not only is email forwarding of your R-MC email blocked, but legacy email protocols such as native iOS, apple mail, IMAP/POP, SMTP, etc. are also blocked.
Email is Public
A best practice is to remember that any email can be viewed and/or accessed as a public document. A best practice is to treat every email as if it will become public information at some point in its life and circulation. Randolph-Macon owns the email stored and used in the college email systems.
Emails containing Sensitive/Confidential Data
Since email is not a secure form of communication, it should never be used to transmit restricted data or sensitive information without using encryption to send and receive email messages securely. Please refer to our Email Encryption Guide for details on how to send, read and reply to encrypted emails.
For further reading see Microsoft's Outlook Best Practices.