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Friday, April 8, 2011

Thank you all for your continued support and assistance in the university's GMail migration, and specifically for your consultation and input on the policy regarding auto-forwarding to non-SJSU accounts. This message is to inform you that we have changed the policy and removed the restriction against users setting auto-forwarding of inbound university GMail traffic to other email accounts. As you are aware, this has long been a topic of debate and controversy, and I spent significant time consulting with all of you, plus many others, from late Fall through early Spring about the auto-forward policy. Ultimately, with the consent of the President's Cabinet, I informed the Senate Executive Committee a few weeks ago that we would set the policy to permit auto-forwarding once the GMail migration is complete.

We have essentially reached that milestone at this point, with only a few pockets of departmental/shared mailboxes still under development. As a result, the technical constraint that was used to implement the restriction was removed over the past weekend and users may now set an auto-forward routing in their university GMail account. Obviously, the university encourages users not to use this feature and to conduct their university business on university systems, but there is ample justification to allow them to do so if they so desire.

On a related note, you have probably heard or seen in the news the significant debate and challenges across the country recently regarding the status of email privacy, academic freedom, and application of the Freedom of Information Act and corresponding state legislation in the area of public employees' email communications. Of relevance to our particular issue on auto-forwarding, I wanted to point out that one part of the debate and controversy extends to state employees' conducting work-related activities through personal email accounts and whether those accounts are subject to open-records laws. At best, it's safe to say the matter is unsettled, evolving and will be a controversial issue for some time, and I just wanted to provide you a heads up as it relates to our email activities.

Thanks again for all your terrific work in completing this major systems transition.

Bill Nance