49 Email Conduct
Official USU Email
An @usu.edu email address is provided to all employees during their term of employment to support their job function. For more information, refer to Policy 550: Appropriate Use of Computing, Networking, and Information Resources. At the conclusion of a term of employment, the employee’s @usu.edu email address and email storage will be retained by USU and deleted or reassigned at USU’s sole discretion. The USU email system is designed to meet the university’s cybersecurity standards, so using your USU email for official business helps protect sensitive information and reduces the risk of security breaches. The university is also required to keep records of official communications. By using the USU email, you ensure that your communications are archived in accordance with USU’s record retention policies.
When to Use Official USU Email
Official Correspondence: Use your USU email for all official university business, including communications with students, colleagues, department heads, and university administration. This includes scheduling meetings, discussing course content, and addressing academic or administrative matters.
Student Communication: Always use your USU email when communicating with students about course-related issues, grades, assignments, or any other matters related to their academic progress.
Sensitive Information Related to Your Position: If you’re sharing or discussing sensitive or confidential information, such as student records (protected under FERPA) or personnel matters, your USU email should be used to ensure compliance with university policies and data protection regulations.
Professional Representation: Your USU email is required when representing the university in any professional capacity, such as when submitting research proposals, applying for grants, or corresponding with external partners. This ensures that you are recognized as an official representative of the institution.
When to Use Your Personal Email
Personal Matters: Use your personal email for any communications unrelated to your role as a faculty member at USU. This includes personal business, communicating with family and friends, or managing personal accounts and subscriptions.
Professional Organizations: If you correspond with external professional organizations or engage in activities that are not directly related to your duties at USU (e.g., freelance work, consulting, personal projects), your personal email may be appropriate, as long as these activities do not conflict with university policies.
Avoiding Conflicts of Interest: Use your personal email to avoid any potential conflicts of interest where your personal activities might intersect with your professional role at USU (e.g., politics). This ensures a clear separation between your personal and professional identities.
To CC or Not to CC
As a general rule, if you’d like someone to access the information in your email but don’t need a response from them, it’s appropriate to use carbon copy (CC.) Using CC instead of sending an email directly to multiple recipients will signal your expectations for their response. Most of the time, you can use CC as an easy way to share information with little downside. However, when in doubt, follow these tips to avoid an email faux pas.
- Only use CC when necessary, not everyone you work with. Even if the email doesn’t need a response, it can clutter your colleague’s inboxes.
- Don’t use CC as a passive-aggressive tool against your colleagues by copying their boss on email.
- While using CC can be a great way to connect colleagues or clients, don’t use it if you’re unsure whether the recipients would want their contact information shared with others on the email.
- Be careful when using Reply All on emails that include CC’d recipients. While Reply All can be useful when you want to share information with everyone in a conversation, it might be unnecessary.
- Don’t expect a response from CC’d recipients. As a rule, a response or action isn’t required unless otherwise requested.
Purpose of BCC
For security and privacy reasons, it is best to use the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) feature when sending an email message to many recipients. When you place email addresses in the BCC field of a message, those addresses are invisible to the email recipients. Using the BCC field to send an email to a large group of people has several benefits:
- All recipients receive the message while their email addresses remain private.
- Forwarded emails and replies only go to the recipients in the To and CC fields, allowing BCC recipients to avoid unnecessary replies from the Reply All feature.
- Many viruses and spam programs are now able to sift through mail files and address books for email addresses. Using the BCC field acts as an anti-spam precaution. It reduces the likelihood that recipients will receive a spam message or a virus from another recipient’s infected computer.
Reply and Reply All
Reply sends your response only to the person who sent the email. CC’d recipients from the initial email will not be included when using the Reply feature. Reply To All or Reply All sends your response to CC’d recipients and the initial sender of the email.
Public Records Request
As with all public employees, records of public university employees are generally subject to disclosure. This does not mean all email messages are open to the public, as federal and state laws allow universities to withhold certain information in employee emails.