Policy for Official email Communications and Memoranda

General:

Email has become the de facto method of communication in higher education, and many institutions are creating policies to govern the effective use of email. This policy addresses large-scale email communications ("mass email") from IIT departments and individuals sent to large lists of recipients at IIT, for example campus-wide announcements. The policy is also a recommendation for personal email communications within IIT.

• When sending an email message to more than 20 people, use the Bcc: field or a distribution list to avoid listing all of the recipients in the To: field.
• Since IIT supports multiple operating systems and email clients, use plain text when composing and sending email messages. For HTML formatted documents, provide hyperlinks to a separate web page within a plain text message rather then sending an HTML formatted email message.
• Except for messages that are urgent or specifically related to university business, all mass email messages should include a method of unsubscribing from the list.
  
• While sending attachments in a specific format such as Microsoft Word or Excel is good when you are collaborating with a few people, the use of platform-specific and application-specific attachments should be avoided when sending mass email. To insure compatibility for all recipients, send mass email attachments as Adobe PDF files. (A free reader is available for PDF files at http://www.adobe.com, and OTS will produce a recommendation for how to best provide Adobe's PDF writer to those who need it. Currently, the writer is about $50/copy)
  
• Staff and faculty should verify their e-mail addresses at http://phonebook.iit.edu and report changes to Human Resources. This is the official email address used in the mass email distribution lists at IIT.
  
• Signatures that include IIT official contact information, such as name, title, department, email address and phone number, should be appended to e-mail messages. Signatures should not include advertisements, jokes, phrases, personal message or other non-contact information.
  
• Mass e-mail messages should be limited to one per day except in the case of emergencies.
  
• If paper copies of email communications are needed, it is the responsibility of the individual or the department receiving the email to produce the paper copies, not the person or department sending the email communication.
  
• The Microsoft Outlook "vcf card" should not be used since it appears as an unusable attachment outside of the Outlook environment.
  
• Email messages that are sent through a distribution list (a list serve), should be set so that replies are to the sender and not to the distribution list. More information about IIT list serves can be found under the Listserv policy.