Email Services at Brown
CIS provides central email services to Brown faculty, staff, students, and affiliates based upon need (see the document Computing Privileges: Access to Electronic Services for details). In addition to these centrally provided services, many departments maintain local mail services for use by members of their own departments. This document details the services provided by CIS in the storage, retrieval, sending, and receiving of email. For information on departmental services, contact departmental system administrators.
Central services include electronic mailboxes, spam and virus filtering, and an @brown.edu email address.
Standards
Because email services are provided to a campus population of approximately 18,000, there are some limitations on use.
Quotas
Quotas have been established that set the capacity for storage on the central email services. See Computing Privileges for current allocations.
Message Size
Brown's standards for inbound and outbound delivery of email delivery are described in the document Electronic Mail Standards. This includes restrictions on the size of inbound and outbound messages.
Addressing
All email sent to people at Brown should be addressed to firstname_lastname@brown.edu. That will ensure that the email is sent to the appropriate mailbox for that individual. Each individual can set where his or her Brown.edu email is sent to by setting their email delivery location in myAccount.
Services
Mail Delivery
Brown's Exchange server provides central mail services for campus, providing MAPI, IMAP and POP delivery. In addition to these central services, several departments on campus have their own local mail delivery services, and many members of the Brown community have their Brown addressed email delivered to non-Brown accounts. Email forwarding is set using myAccount.
Mail Sending
Email sent out by members of the Brown community from on campus should follow the recommended configurations described in Email Configuration Settings for Faculty and Staff or Email for Students.
Spam Filtering
Email sent to Brown addresses must pass through the Proofpoint protection server, which quarantines suspected spam before it can be delivered. This service scans incoming email for certain key phrases and behaviors (messages written in all caps, for example), and places likely spam in quarantine. It also sends a periodic spam quarantine digest to each recipient, which allows review and release of quarantined messages.
Virus Scanning
In addition to spam filtering, all email messages addressed to Brown University email addresses or sent through mail-relay.brown.edu to addresses outside of Brown are scanned for viruses. The email passes through a McAfee anti-virus gateway, which monitors attachments for viruses in all incoming email addressed to @brown.edu, and all outgoing mail from clients using mail-relay.brown.edu. It attempts to clean infected files, dropping them before the files even arrive in your email box.
If an attachment can't be scrubbed, the email message will be delivered but will contain a footer notification of the attached virus's removal. Most likely, email received with this notification is not legitimate email and is instead a virus.
Alternate Email Addresses
Up to four additional email addresses can be created for each email box using myAccount. These can be used as name variants or for specific business purposes. These addresses are unique and specific to the holder, which assures that email is delivered to the chosen alternate address(es). More details about alternate addresses, including limitations of the service can be found within the myAccount screens.
Directory
Brown's directory service is an electronic version of the paper phone directory that allows for sophisticated searches on listed names.
Related Documents
Computing Privileges: Access to Electronic Services | Electronic Mail Policy | Electronic Mail Standards