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Student E-mail Policies

Reviewed 05/02/06

In order to provide easy communication among students, faculty and staff, OIT has as one of its goals to provide a convenient, fast, functional and reliable mail server, which students can access on- or off-campus using a web browser or an email client of their choice.

We wish to support academic needs at a reasonable cost in money and staff time. So we need email policies which support reasonable academic needs, but which place restrictions on inefficient email practices. There are many pressing academic needs for IT resources, and so it is not our priority to devote unlimited resources to provide email. The policies which follow are intended to meet the above goals. Students who use the system responsibly and with reasonable care should not be adversely affected at all.

  • We do not forward messages from Drake student accounts to other services such as Hotmail or Yahoo. It is a responsibility of students as members of the Drake community to check their Drake accounts regularly for messages from faculty and administrators. Students are of course welcome to continue using their Hotmail, etc. accounts for their own, non-academic purposes.  Mass mailing announcements sent to all students from Drake faculty and staff are now deleted after fourteen days (with an allowance for vacation periods).
  • Messages will be retained on the server for an interval equal to one semester plus one week. Thereafter they will be deleted on a rolling basis. Students who use an email client are encouraged to download any messages they want to keep to their local machines, and delete them and any attachments from the server. Students who use a web browser should print their messages, download attachments and then delete both. This message retention policy applies to all students.
  • A disk quota of 15 megabytes is allocated (enough room for hundreds of messages and some multimedia files). A warning will be sent to student when the limit is approached, and if necessary messages will be deleted to bring the account under the limit. Space being used can be checked at http://mail.drake.edu/duwebfiles/emailquota.html. This disk space allocation policy applies to all students.
  • If an email account is being used in conjunction with a class project, a request for additional, temporary space may be sent to noc@drake.edu. Please include a one sentence description of the project, the name of the course and the instructor. A special web site for this purpose will be developed in the near future.
  • Accounts not accessed for 90 days that have grossly exceeded the disk space allocation will be given special treatment. Messages over 30 days old that have originated from outside of Drake will be deleted. In addition, accounts in this category that are subscribed to mailing lists will have their incoming messages rejected for two weeks to allow time for list senders to delete those accounts from their lists. Spam-based lists are the major concern. A student may request that the block on incoming messages be removed during the two week period by sending a message to noc@drake.edu. Otherwise, the receipt of messages is resumed after the two weeks.
  • One of the principal causes of slow mail access is a large in-box (with hundreds of messages). Students will find the system more responsive if they empty their in-box every time they access the system, either by moving messages to other folders, or by downloading them to their local machine and deleting them from the in-box.
  • Student e-mail accounts are retained until graduation or withdrawal from the University. Accounts are removed approximately six weeks after graduation. However, an account may be retained a brief time for a graduate seeking employment and using the Drake e-mail account for potential employer contact.  Contact Patsy Johnson (X2453) or patsy.johnson@drake.edu for arrangements prior to graduation.  If a student withdraws from the University, the account will be removed once we are notified by the Student Records and Academic Information Office.

Please send comments and questions to Paul Morris, Chief Information Officer, paul.morris@drake.edu