Forwarding your mail

Butte College email is the official means of communicating any college related information. The expectation is that all campus related email communications will be sent to and originate from Butte College accounts.  This makes our communications more efficient, and also protects our campus and student data.

Forwarding your email is strongly discouraged--all students, faculty, and staff should check their Butte College email account regularly for campus communications.

From a pure practicality standpoint, relying on forwarding to or sending from personal accounts puts your communication and identity at risk. We receive consistent reports of the following email issues with forwarded or personal account email between faculty, staff, and students:

• Outdated or misspelled personal email addresses present communication errors and confusion when email is forwarded to an incorrect personal account. It is not uncommon for faculty to send an email to their class, and have a number of emails bounce from incorrect forwarded accounts. Trying to determine who these accounts are associated with can delay class data getting to the faculty or student in a timely fashion. Assignments have been lost because a student never received the assignment sent to an incorrect email address.

• When we receive email from a student's personal account, we have no way to know who, for example, pussycat15@gmail.com is. Faculty and staff have had to spend time (sometimes significant time) trying to determine which student was involved in these communications. This can delay financial aid, grading, registration, etc. 

• Faculty using a personal account for communicating to students cannot be verified. We have had students contact ITSS trying to verify that a message was really sent from their faculty. Since the message was sent from a personal account, we cannot verify identity for the student.

• With malicious email phishing on the rise, everyone should be reticent to open messages from non-Butte accounts. We have seen drastic increases in attempts to gain your personal data and campus protected data through these attempts. Using your Butte account reduces these risks.

• Requests for ITSS to assist with forwarded email issues are not supported. We cannot support or troubleshoot email issues for personal email accounts--we do not have the tools or authority to do so.

Office 365 mitigates the need for forwarding to personal accounts by addressing a number of issues:

• Email will always be retained in a Butte account. "Did you look in your Butte email account" becomes the standard answer for all email communications
• E-mail will not bounce back if sent to an active Butte College address since that address is always correct
• @student.xzzhubao.com is the only reliable official address for students
• ITSS can fully support and troubleshoot email issues in our Office 365 tenet
• Large mailbox quotas: 50GBs
• Easy access on mobile devices using standard built in mail apps
• Campus controlled email security with robust email virus checking and malware blocking
• Campus communications are protected by our enterprise contract with Microsoft. Microsoft does not own our campus data—we retain all rights