On January 2014, the UF Office of the Vice President and General Counsel published a policy on the auto-forwarding of email. The policy states:
“In order to meet legal and compliance obligations relating to security and retention of electronic records, the University of Florida prohibits the auto-forwarding of business-related electronic mail.”
And it can be viewed at: http://generalcounsel.ufl.edu/regulations-and-policies/auto-forwarding/
You may still manually forward individual messages off campus as long as they do not contain restricted data, but individuals are no longer allowed to have their email automatically forwarded off-campus.
Why does the university care where your email is delivered? There are two primary reasons why the university cares:
- The ability to comply with Sunshine Law requests is impeded when a person¹s business email is not stored on campus email systems. If your UF business-related email resides on UF servers, it will be easier for UF personnel to comply with Sunshine Law requests. There has been much written in the local press regarding Sunshine Law requests and a dean search in the College of Law recently, and this is definitely a concern.
- There is a risk that restricted data could be compromised if it is mistakenly sent in email and that email is auto-forwarded off campus. For example, let’s say an email containing a spreadsheet with a list of student names and their grades in a course were accidentally sent to a department mailing list, that would constitute a FERPA violation. If all of the subscribers to that list had their email stored on UF servers, those emails could be removed fairly trivially. However, if the subscribers to that mailing list auto-forwarded their email off campus, it would be difficult to remove them from the remote systems and there may be risks and penalties that UF might face due to the FERPA violation.
Please understand, this is a UF policy, and not an IT policy. DCP IT recommendation is to only use your UF email address for business purposes and have a separate personal email account that you use for your personal exchanges.