Contact Us Search Site Index About This Site Edit Decrease text size Increase text size Georgetown University main web site Contact Us Search Site Index About This Site
spacer spacer spacer
University Information Services at Georgetown University
Faculty Help Staff Help Student Help About UIS

GUMail: Email Forwarding Service

back to GUMail: Index to Online Support Resources

 

E-mail Forwarding Service

  • What is Happening?
  • Evolving Trends
  • Effects of Anti-SPAM Tools
  • Delays in routing and delivery
  • Actions to keep our mail going 
  • Adaptive re-engineering

Privacy and Security

  • Use External Accounts with Caution
  • Maintain your Privacy

E-mail Forwarding Service

For the past several years, the University has provided faculty, staff, students, and alumni the option to forward email addressed to their netid@georgetown to an external account. In addition to alumni, many students and some faculty and staff members have chosen to forward their mail to external services such as AOL, Yahoo, Google (gmail), Hotmail, blackberry services and others.

Trends We are seeing several trends evolve that are affecting University communication as users decide to use forwarding services and the major external email providers change their behaviors. For example, many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as AOL, Yahoo, et al, have begun instituting protections to manage the rise of Spam and increasing mail traffic to their servers. . "Rate limiting", or reducing the amount of mail accepted per second from services that produce large volumes of mail, is one of these protections.

Effects Many universities, including Georgetown that offer forwarding services to large groups of users are being adversely affected by this practice. For example, Yahoo sees e-mail traffic not only from Georgetown users sending mail to non-Georgetown Yahoo users, but also all mail sent to anyone forwarding their mail from netid@georgetown to their Yahoo account as Georgetown traffic.

Delays As e-mail delivery depends on both the sender's service and the recipient's service accepting the mail, we experience delays when forwarding or sending mail to these destinations. We regularly monitor the delivery speeds to popular services such as Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, and Google, and have been witnessing significant and erratic changes in the acceptance rate and subsequent delivery times. These changes can shift from an average 12 second delay on one day to upwards of several hours on another.

Actions While we can not control the behavior at an external destination, we are taking several steps to mitigate these problems. We continue to work with the major ISPs to reduce the types of mail behavior created by forwarding services that most result in rate limiting actions. Our own e-mail service is designed to separate mail by delivery destination into specific queues. These queues protect against a slowdown at one service affecting mail destined for another location. For example, a delay in Yahoo acceptance times would not affect mail sent to another educational institution (.edu). However, all mail destined to Yahoo during a slow acceptance rate period is affected.

Deleting 'Orphaned' Accounts Increasingly, we are seeing a number of users who opt into forwarding services but fail to maintain their external account. For example, a user may set up forwarding to a "yahoo account" and then later close or abandon that account but not remove the forwarding from the netid@georgetown address. In this situation, the University mail service and the external service, yahoo, are affected as multiple attempts to deliver messages and broadcast mail are made to the nonexistent account. We are removing the forwarding, in situations where messages sent to an email address are returned with multiple permanent errors, indicating that an account is abandoned. While we take these proactive steps to remove forwarding in those situations, we need all users who opt into forwarding services to keep their account information up to date.

Adaptive engineering Over the next few months, we will be examining our forwarding services and will need to identify the appropriate practices to avoid forwarding mail to external accounts that have been over quota for a significant period of time. We may also need to re-visit vacation message practices.

Privacy and Security Issues

In addition to the delay issues described above, it is important to realize that forwarding your mail may create other unintended consequences. Several commercial services such as Google regularly scan the content of all mail messages for marketing purposes. This information and your individual information are stored on the commercial services system creating a privacy and confidentiality issue for any communication that is confidential or sensitive. Even if you believe that your communication is not confidential, others who may be sending messages to you may not be comfortable with these privacy issues.

Commercial services also may not require encryption or protect against virus transmission by removing executable files. If you do forward your mail to a commercial service, please review and research the terms of your agreement, and take proactive measures to protect your information and computers.

If you any questions or concerns please feel free to contact the UIS Helpdesk at help@georgetown.edu or 687-4949.

return to top of page
spacer