Alternate Email Addresses

Often users on campus require additional email address for different reasons; a long name, for a student group, or for a departmental group. Brown offers a few different ways to care to the specific needs of its users with 3 alternatives

  • Alternate Email Addresses
  • Shared Email addresses
  • List Serve Email addresses

      • Alternate Email Addreses

      Alternate Email addresses, are email addresses any Brown user can add to their user account.


       Faculty and staff can do this at myAccount under the "Alternate Address(es) link."

      Students are required to visit the Help Desk and fill out an E09 form so the email address can be verified and confirmed by a member of the Accounts and Passwords Group.

      Alternate email addresses have the following naming conventions:
      Students MUST present an ID upon submission of the E09 form.
      The E09 form must be brought to the Help Desk, it CAN NOT be submitted via email
      An alternate email address must be in relation to the user’s name.
      An alternate address can not be an email address for a Student/Department group; users looking to set up an email address for a student or department group should look at the Shared and List descriptions to help decide what option would best suit the group.
      With the launch of some new software applications at Brown in March of ’06 usernames are no longer re-usable. This means that some email addresses are also unusable, if they are the same as a “locked” username. Unfortunately, the new software changes did not purge the system. So, users with alternate email addresses reflecting a “locked” username still exist. During an alternate email address change, if the system comes across a locked email address it will not allow the user's account to be updated until the email address is removed.

      Shared email addresses

      • Departmental NetIDs- Also known as “BIFs”, Departmental NetIDs are primarily used to create shared mailboxes or email aliases for department or student group-based purposes.  If a user or users need a specially-named e-mail address for a group or other purposes, or need to make changes to an existing special email address box, they will need a Departmental NetID form. The shared account is much like a user's personal email. It has its own mailbox, login and quota. This is by far the more popular of the two group email options, and is often used for student groups. The form for this account can be found here

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      • The form must be filled out properly and signed by a department head or staff member at the Student Activities Office (SAO), and the requesting party. A department head must sign for employees and a member of the SAO must sign for students using this form.

      Listserv Email addresses

      • A listserv allows you to send an email message to a central distribution list that forwards the message to all of its members. This is the least popular version of alternate email options. Seeing it is only a forwarding email address it counts against the user's quota, and is not recommended for groups who plan on getting a high volume of email. In order to establish a list serve email: listmaint@brown.edu or visit the Listserv form to apply online and read more about the service.