The Saint Mary's e-mail system is an official form of comunication for the College.

Students must use their Saint Mary's e-mail address for all e-mail correspondence with Saint Mary's faculty and staff.

• If your Saint Mary's account is forwarded to another address, and Saint Mary's College is blacklisted by any Internet Service Providers (ISPs, such as AT&T, Comcast, Charter, etc.) or e-mail providers (AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail), your Saint Mary's e-mail will not be delivered to the forwarded address. There is no way to retrieve the undelivered mail. (Blacklisting occurs when a Saint Mary's e-mail account is compromised and used to send spam - it typically takes one to two business days to have saintmarys.edu removed from all ISP ad e-mail provider blacklists when this occurs.)

• If you forward your Saint Mary's account to another address, you may find yourself locked out of your e-mail account until the issue can be addressed in person with Kathy Hausmann, Coordinator of Student Computing. (Kathy Hausmann is the contact for all students, faculty, and staff when they are locked out of e-mail.)

• If a student uses another account (AOL, Hotmail, etc.) to e-mail a faculty or staff member, faculty or staff member have been instructed to not respond. Saint Mary's College cannot verify the identity of non-Saint Mary's e-mail accounts.

For these reasons, we encourage students to have all their third-party (and non-Gmail) e-mail forwarded to their Saint Mary's e-mail account, and to use the latter in all correspondence. (Access to third-party e-mail accounts is not blocked at Saint Mary's College, and students may continue to use those accounts for non-academic purposes if they wish.)

You can use Gmail to access your Saint Mary's account. Instructions can be found on the ResNet FAQ at http://www.saintmarys.edu/resnet/resnetfaq/gmail.html With these instructions:

• You pull your messages off Zimbra and save them in Gmail. You are then only dependant on the quota of your Gmail account, not the quota of your Saint Mary's account.

• You will also be able to send messages from your Saint Mary's account via Gmail.

• With these settings, your Gmail account will still receive your Saint Mary's e-mail messages even if the College is blacklisted by ISPs and e-mail providers.

• You will not lose any messages already in Gmail from your Saint Mary's account when your Saint Mary's account expires.

Saint Mary's e-mail accounts typically expire six months after a student's departure from the College. A notice will be sent to your Saint Mary's e-mail account prior to its expiration to give you the exact date that the account will no longer function. For more information on the expiration of network accounts, please refer to http://www.saintmarys.edu/resnet/resnetfaq/accountexpiration.html.