Organizational email is offered as a communications medium to assist Northeastern State University (NSU) organizations in conducting their official day-to-day business.

AVAILABILITY

• All organizations, officially recognized by the university, qualify for an email account through this program.
  
• Application forms are available online at by clicking . A form must be completed and approved by the Dean or the Administrator of the organization.
  
• An email account may be requested at any time during the year.
  
• Five working days are required after an application is submitted before the email account will be available.

ABOUT THE email ACCOUNT

• An email account may be issued on either a temporary or permanent basis.
  
• Accounts are issued to colleges, departments, or organizations. They do not belong to individuals and, in that sense, are not portable.
  
• NSU and Computing and Telecommunications (C&T) assumes no responsibility for loss which may arise due to the use of the email account, regardless of the cause of the loss.
  On the rare occasion a single PC is not available, e.g., the members of the organization are required to check the email from lab PCs. Arrangements will be make to allow the email to be stored on the network and be accessible from multiple PCs. Proper request authorization from a sponsor is required.

REASONABLE USE

• The email account is offered as a service, it is not a right.
• If an email account is used for announcements, discretion should be used when selecting subject matter and wording.
• The password to an email account assigned to an organization will be issued to the Dean or Administrator of the organization.
• While email accounts are not published by Computing and Telecommunications, there is no guarantee that an email address will not be widely known.
• The password must be protected.
• The password to an email account assigned to an organization wilt be issued to the Dean or Administrator of the organization.
• The password is required to retrieve and delete messages left in the inbox.
• There is not a facility which allows C&T to determine if an email account is being accessed by unauthorized persons, i.e., someone who knows the password but should not.
• If an organization loses official recognition by the university, the organization sponsor will be given a 24 hour notice and the email account will be deleted.
• The Office of C&T reserves the right to remove an email address from service if it is being used in an offensive or illegal manner as viewed under the NSU Acceptable Use Policy.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Organizational email assignments are issued on a first come basis. Duplicates can not be created. Assuming the requested email address is not already in use, it will then be assigned.
   
   
2. The requesting organization fills out the COLLEGE OR DEPARTMENT email POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION, request form. On this form, the department should provide the requested email address to be assigned (e.g. helpdesk@nsuok.edu). The characters to the right of the @ symbol remain constant (i.e., @nsuok.edu). The left side of the @ symbol is called an alias. The alias is equated to an official email address created in a particular pattern (see below) for all organizations. Each organization is encouraged to choose an alias that helps describe their organization.
   
   
3. The main extension of the requesting organization is also required. The requesting organization will receive two email addresses - one alias and one official. The official address will be assigned by C&T and will be based on the main phone extension of the requesting organization. The naming convention used for the official address is NSUxxxxy, where xxxx is the phone extension and y is any alphanumeric character that makes it unique within that organization. Using the example above, a request for the email address helpdesk@nsuok.edu from the Microcomputing Service Center (MSC) would get the official email address NSU5555A@nsuok.edu issued to it with the alias helpdesk@nsuok.edu. Emails sent to or from either address would be sent and received in the same fashion and would be managed from the NSU5555A@nsuok.edu email account.
   
   
4. Some suggestions for creating aliases:
   • Use dot, underscore, or dash for word separators.
   • Mix upper and lower case to improve readability (the alias is actually case-insensitive).
   • Avoid using special characters such as @, angled brackets, pound signs, quotes, etc.

If you need additional information on how to manage your new account or how to create a second user profile in Netscape, please contact the Microcomputing Services Center at ext. 5678.