Impact Area: SUNY Morrisville (Morrisville Campus, Norwich Campus, EOC)
General Subject Area: Technology
Specific Subject Area: Electronic Mail
Author: Technology Services
Policy Summary
Official E-mail Account for Communication
Official College E-mail Accounts
An official College e-mail account is one in which the address ends with "morrisville.edu." All students, faculty and staff are assigned an e-mail address and account while enrolled or employed at SUNY Morrisville.
Email Account Creation
Faculty/Staff: Upon official appointment to the College, a morrisville.edu account is created for all faculty and staff. Faculty and staff e-mail addresses will consist of the first 6 letters of the last name and the first and middle initial as defined in the Human Resources Office. Changes to these e-mail addresses can only be made after a name change is filed with the Information Resources Registrar’s Office.
Students: All official student e-mail accounts are automatically created, with a username determined via data within the Banner Student Information System and end in morrisville.edu.
Student e-mail address will consist of the first 6 letters of the student’s last name and the last 3 numbers of their Morrisville Student ID#, as defined in the Registrar's Office. Changes to student e-mail addresses can only be made after a legal name change is filed with the Registrar's Office.
Expectations to Check E-mail
Students, faculty, and staff are expected to check their e-mail on a frequent and consistent basis in order to stay current with college-related communications. All users have the responsibility to recognize that certain communications may be time critical. It is recommended that e-mail be checked daily, but at a minimum, twice per week. Regular e-mail management will also minimize the risk that the inbox will be full, causing the e-mail to be returned to the sender with an error. Undeliverable messages returned because of either a full inbox or use of a "spam" filter will be considered delivered, without further action required of the College.
Redirection of E-mail
If a user wishes to redirect e-mail from their official @morrisville.edu address to another email address (e.g., @yahoo.com, @gmail.com), they may do so, but at their own initiative and risk. The College will not be responsible for the handling of e-mail by non-SUNY Morrisville providers. Redirecting e-mail does not absolve students, faculty and staff from the responsibilities associated with official communication sent to their @morrisville.edu account.
Expectations for Appropriate Use of E-mail
Users are expected to act with honesty, integrity and respect for the rights, privileges, and privacy of the College community.
Users are expected to abide by all applicable federal and state laws and rules, including College policies and SUNY policies.
Consistent with the college Computing and Electronic Communication Use Policy, personal use of the College’s computing and networking resources by users should be incidental use. Conducting business for profit using College resources is forbidden.
Users should exercise extreme caution in using e-mail to communicate confidential or sensitive matters and should not assume that e-mail is private and confidential. It is especially important that users are careful to send messages only to the intended recipient(s). Particular care should be taken when using the "reply" command during e-mail correspondence.
Educational Uses of E-mail
Faculty will determine how electronic forms of communication (e.g., e-mail, discussion boards, discussion lists etc.) will be used for educational purposes, and the College recommends that they specify their requirements in the course syllabus. The official e-mail policy ensures that all students will be able to comply with e-mail-based course requirements specified by faculty.
Ownership/Administration
SUNY Morrisville owns all e-mail accounts run on systems it administers. The College generally does not monitor or restrict content residing on its systems; however, if there is reasonable cause to believe that a user has violated this policy or other applicable College policies, SUNY policies, and/or federal and state laws and regulations, the College reserves the right to take any of the following actions:
- Terminate a faculty or staff member’s access to the College’s computing and networking resources; and/or
- Limit a faculty or staff member’s access to the College’s computing and networking resources; and/or
- Remove the documents/materials/postings from the College’s computing and networking resources.
Quota, maximum message size, message retention settings, time-out settings, maintenance times, and other e-mail guidelines will be set as appropriate for the anticipated needs of the College. The need to revise settings will be monitored and implemented as appropriate by Technology Services.
Security
Outbound Messages: In order to secure e-mail communications, faculty and staff e-mails are electronically scanned when they are sent to students and non-SUNY Morrisville recipients. The messages are checked for viruses, spam or certain types of personal information including but not limited to social security numbers.
Inbound Messages: To assure network security and efficiency, the College utilizes various filtering technologies that detect potential SPAM, phishing, and other malicious schemes. These potentially harmful e-mail messages will be intercepted and held in the user’s retrievable quarantine (Junk Folder). Messages where high risk content has been detected can be prevented from completing delivery.
E-mail users should not open unexpected attachments from unknown or even known senders, nor follow Web links within an e-mail message unless the user is certain that the link is legitimate. Following a link in an e-mail message executes code that can also install malicious programs on the workstation.
Encryption Requirements on Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Internal email communications are those qualified to be between a sender and recipients, all of which are addressed with the @morrisville.edu domain name. Internal communications that contain Personal Identifiable Information must be encrypted by the sender for transmission utilizing the encryption capabilities of any email application (ex. Outlook) that also meets or exceeds the minimum standard encryption methods. PII includes but is not limited to Social Security Numbers, SUNY Morrisville IDs (M#’s & Global IDs), employee identification numbers, financial and payroll data. Communications that typically carry PII can be numerous amongst the various offices, and each should assess the tasks that naturally need to send PII and deem them to be encrypted. Those that have determined the need to utilize email encryption and require assistance can contact Technology Services or consult the “Faculty & Staff Resource Center” in Brightspace for training materials.
External communications of PII data, i.e. 3rd party recipients whose domain is not @morrisville.edu and where authorization of transmission has not been approved, are prohibited.
Privacy and Confidentiality: Official College communications sent by e-mail are subject to the same public information, privacy and records retention requirements and policies as other official College communications. By using the College’s computing and networking resources, users are consenting to the College’s monitoring or access to electronic information of all sorts, for compliance, investigatory and disciplinary purposes, without further notice to the user. In using the College’s computing and networking resources, users shall have no expectation of privacy.
Violations/Abuses
Violation or abuse of the campus policies may result in restriction of access to SUNY Morrisville’s e-mail system and/or other appropriate disciplinary action.