Policies
Mass Electronic Mail Policy
Introduction
Electronic mail, in common with other IT services, is provided to facilitate a person's work as an employee or student of the University, specifically for educational, training, administrative, or research purposes. The e-mail servers installed by IT Services during 2000 make it technically feasible to send a message to all registered users without a significant technical impact on the services. However, in order to ensure effective use of mass mailing and associated web and e-mail services, the University requires policy guidelines.
Messages to all
Messages that might be sent to all staff and / or all students can be considered as being of three classes:
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Messages where all individuals should receive their own copy direct to their own mailbox.
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Messages where all individuals should be aware of the existence of the information but do not need to receive their own direct copy.
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Messages where all individuals have potential access to the information.
Type 1 messages would be official communications that need to go to all individuals. Examples might include urgent medical information or an important security problem.
Type 2 messages would be announcements that affect or are of broad interest to many individuals within the University. Examples might include the announcement of a new Staff Development course, road closures, service disruption due to power outages, and University events such as the annual carol service. Events that are open to the public will, however, normally be advertised on the University events diary and need not be included on the noticeboard.
Type 3 messages would be information likely to be found trivial by many people or likely to be of interest to only a small minority. Examples might include "Car for sale", "Kittens to a good home".
The University will deal with these types of messages in three distinct ways:
Type 1 messages for staff will be sent by direct e-mail to all staff following approval from the Director of Marketing and Communications.
Type 1 messages for students will be sent by direct e-mail to all students following approval from the Director of Marketing and Communications, in consultation with Loughborough Students' Union.
Type 2 messages for staff will be sent by registered users to the Staff (web) Notice board. A weekly digest summarising messages from the previous week is sent to all staff.
Type 2 messages for students will be sent by registered users to the Student (web) Notice board. A weekly digest summarising messages from the previous week is sent to all students.
Type 3 messages for all members of the University will be sent by any member to the General (web) Notice board.
Individuals wishing to send Type 1 messages should contact the Director of Marketing and Communications in the first instance. Individuals wishing to send Type 2 messages should contact IT Services' Service Desk in the first instance.
Other large scale direct e-mail
Sometimes it will be appropriate to send messages directly to large subsets of the University, e.g. all academic and related staff, or all students in the Faculty of Science. Where the message is Type 1 and the recipient group is University-wide this should be dealt with as above. Where the message is Type 1 but for a within-Faculty group, this should be dealt with by arrangements between the Dean (or his / her nominee) and IT Services. It is anticipated that general arrangements will be made, which will enable each Faculty to conduct its own business effectively. Type 2 messages, which are intended for a particular group, should be marked as such, preferably within the message title, but otherwise dealt with as above.
Special notes
All messages sent must take account of the University's IT Acceptable Use Policy. In particular, those who are given facilities to send University-wide Type 2 messages, or to send large-scale direct e-mail, must ensure that these are only used for appropriate purposes.
Type 1 messages should be in plain text and kept as short as possible. They may not contain any attachments. Where there is a requirement to pass a document to all staff and / or students, the person sending the message should make arrangements for the document to be placed on a web server and include the URL in the message. Arrangements for placement of files on a web server can either be made via a departmental web author or, where this is not possible, via our Service Desk.
Type 2 & type 3 messages may contain attachments as these are dealt with automatically and are never sent in their full form to recipients.
Approved 22 November 2000
Modified November 2005
Modified April 2007
Modified October 2010