Details: Hamline provides a GroupWise email account to full-time faculty and all staff members.* All employees are required to use this official account for Hamline-related correspondence.
This policy provides Hamline greater protection against email blacklisting. It also allows Hamline to more easily ensure delivery of messages, diagnose delivery problems, and report and prevent spam. You can access GroupWise through the full software client installed on all Hamline computers (on the Saint Paul campus or Minneapolis Center), or via the Internet at www.hamline.edu/gw. All Hamline employees automatically have a GroupWise account generated at the time of hire, however, in some cases, adjunct faculty, independent contractors, and others do not automatically receive an account, and should request that an account be created.
If you do not have an account, do not remember how to access your account, or have questions regarding GroupWise, please review the KnowledgeBase GroupWise section or contact the HelpDesk at 651-523-2220 or itshelp@hamline.edu.
* In some cases, distinctions between full-time, part-time, and adjuncts are blurred or employee status changes. If you do not know if you have a GroupWise account, please contact the HelpDesk at 651-523-2220 or itshelp@hamline.edu.
Background to the policy
Advances in technology often bring new challenges. Now that email has become the primary method by which faculty, staff, and students communicate at Hamline, challenges have emerged that signal the need for changes in the way things are done.
The most immediate example is the January 2005 blacklisting of the domain “hamline.edu” by the filtering service SpamCop. A blacklist stops mail from anyaddress@hamline.edu from reaching its intended recipients.
A primary cause of the original blacklist is the fact that 51 percent of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline used a non-Hamline email account for their job-related or academic communication. Services such as SpamCop, AOL, MSN, and Hotmail make it very easy for users to report spam; many may not even know they are doing it. In January of 2005, Hamline exceeded the threshold number of complaints and got on SpamCop’s blacklist.
This policy was adopted on August 1, 2005, requiring faculty, staff, and degree and licensure-seeking students to use an official Hamline account for university business. Faculty and staff use GroupWise to access their email; students use Google Mail.
Enforcing this policy reduces the risk of future blacklisting and provides the following benefits:
- Message delivery is more assured, and delivery problems can be easily diagnosed.
- Hamline’s Information Technology Services staff have control over the mechanisms for reporting and preventing spam and will report only those messages that are truly spam.
- Users have the ability to separate their work/school transactions from personal communications.
- Web interfaces are available for both GroupWise and Google Mail, allowing users the option of checking messages from any browser or PDA.
- Several Hamline services can be accessed only through a GroupWise or Google Mail login, including the campus wireless network (available beginning August 15), proxy access to library databases, and Internet access in the residence halls.
The change to mandatory use of GroupWise and Google Mail is only one strategy in a broader email policy review and procedural changes.