Email : Introduction
Email is freely available to DoC staff and students. Please be sure to check your email on a regular basis; it is considered to be the primary method of communicating with staff and students within the Department.
Historically, DoC operated its own mail system separately to the rest of the College. We have now migrated to the College Exchange system, and all new users are setup with College Exchange mailboxes from day one. The @doc.ic.ac.uk mail domain is now frozen and exists only for backwards compatility to ensure that email sent to old @doc.ic.ac.uk email addresses is routed on it's way to (usually) a College mailbox.
The DoC email domain will exist in this frozen state for as long as it is needed - most likely, many years. CSG and DoC will take the final decision when the DoC email domain could ever be killed off.
This page attempts to give accurate information about both systems.
Email addresses
Your primary email address at Imperial is usually of the form:
Students |
|
|
|
Staff |
In addition, you can also be emailed as:
where xyz13 is your login |
Long-standing DoC users also have two other addresses (but new DoC users do not!):
where abc09 is your login |
|
Students |
|
Staff |
Email sent to any of these addresses should always end up in the same place -- your College mailbox (unless you've chosen to forward your College email offsite).
Email: so how do I read it?
Unless you have chosen to forward your College email offsite somewhere, you may read all College email via:
https://exchange.imperial.ac.uk/ - Outlook Web Access - the College webmail service
Any IMAP and SMTP capable mail client, ideally creating a separate "College" email account, using the College Settings in the Email Settings page. Currently, we recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux, Windows and Macs.
A few users are experiencing "500 Internal Server Error" when they login to https://exchange.imperial.ac.uk/. If this happens to you, please contact the ICT service desk (0207 594 9000, aka x49000, level 4 Sherfield).
More info about College email:
Managing Messages by using Rules - we recommend that you only setup server-side rules.
How to Request a College Mailman mailing list - ICT will contact us to request confirmation for new mailing lists, so please discuss this with us first.
How to find an email address
Someone in DoC |
Use the DoC People Finder |
Someone in Imperial |
Use the College Directory |
Someone elsewhere |
Ask them! (Or perhaps try Google.) |
Mailing lists
CSG maintains various automatically generated mailing lists enabling users to mail groups of people within DoC, passing this information automatically to ICT. Some mailing lists are restricted to staff only, mainly to avoid people using them to send junk mail. Others can only be used if you are emailing from within the Department. Most lists have a backwards compatible form such as second-year@doc.ic.ac.uk and a new College-compatible form such as doc-second-year@imperial.ac.uk.
Students should only send email to mailing lists if you have been given permission to do so, by the Senior Tutor. Staff should take care in which mailing lists they use; if in doubt, consult CSG.
Sending email about trivial issues (e.g. "I've lost my...") to large mailing lists is not only forbidden, but also very unwise -- since the sender may well receive unwanted replies from irate users.
It should be noted that sending mail to a large mailing list places a heavy load on the College mailservers, since it will have to deliver around 1500 copies of the same message.
See the main Mailing lists page for lists of automatically generated lists and their current members.
Some notes of caution
- Please make sure the address you are sending email to is correct.
- The confidentiality of any mail messages sent is not guaranteed. You should not send material of a private or delicate nature.
- The authenticity of emails that you receive is not guaranteed. Internet email systems provide, at best, minimal guarantees that any given email actually originated from the claimed address. This is especially true if the email was received from a computer system located outside Imperial.
Note the Departmental and College regulations covering computer use, particularly as they cover the content of emails.
- Outside of the Department, the delivery of email is not guaranteed. It is a very reliable system but you should treat sending an email as you would sending a letter -- very occasionally one can get lost. If delivery is critical then you should consider confirming receipt, either by return of email or a telephone call. You should also bear in mind that some people have very aggressive mail filtering which may cause your email message to be misclassified as spam.