Over the years, and accelerated by the response to the COVID pandemic, there has been an expansion in the ability of faculty and staff to work at home in addition to (or instead of) being on campus to meet their job responsibilities. Even now, many UD employees work at home on a hybrid schedule or are fully remote. In most cases, UD has provided a university-owned computer to staff who are working off campus, to facilitate their access to UD-managed email, calendar, and file storage resources.
Since we spend so much time on our UD systems, it’s tempting to just use your UD email address (yourname@udel.edu) for all of your email and for authentication to various websites you might use for professional and personal/shopping purposes.
This is ill-advised, and here’s why:
First, the question of UD policy.
University policy requires that UD Computing resources not be used for commercial or non-university-related activities without authorization. Further, the “University Charter prohibits the Management of the University to benefit any party, sect, or denomination”.
Employees may choose to participate in any of the above activities but cannot use University resources to support their personal activities. Since your UD email account is a UD Computing resource, any personal activities should be performed on a privately-owned computer using a personal email account.
View the detailed policy.
Professionalism & Privacy
OOPS! While it can be convenient to have all of your email in one place, it dramatically increases the chance of sending a personal email to a professional contact or mailing list and vice versa. What if a personal email disclosing medical, social, or personal career issues inadvertently goes to your supervisor or to a staff email list by mistake? It can be awkward and embarrassing at best, and potentially career-damaging.
Additionally, your UD email is owned by the University. It is not yours. It could be subject to legal discovery, with the contents made available to university officers if it could be relevant to a legal or personnel investigation. Obviously, this doesn’t happen often, but by moving your personal content to a personal email account, you can ensure the privacy of your information.
Protecting access to your email history in the event you leave UD.
If you leave UD for any reason, you may lose access to your UD email account. If you’ve used that account for personal email and transactions, you will lose access to those as well. Moving your personal email activities to a personal email account lets you preserve your personal information regardless of your employment status.
Records you should move to your personal email account include, but are not limited to:
- Online banking and tax records
- Online purchases
- Personal email
- Personal media accounts
- Personal social media accounts
Recognizing Phishing Attacks
Using a personal email for personal activities ensures you will have access to your email history. And, you might be able to more easily notice when phishing emails are illegitimate (e.g., why is Target sending me an email to my UD account? Perhaps it’s not really from Target?).
So what do I do if I don’t already have a personal email account?
- Create a separate email account from your UD email. Free accounts are available from many commercial providers such as Gmail, Outlook, AOL, iCloud and others.
- Look at your personal website logins, subscriptions and shopping accounts that might have been set up with a UDEL.EDU email account. Change those accounts to use the personal account that you’ve set up.
- Export any personal email from your UD email account to your new personal email account.
If you don’t already have and use a personal email address, it makes sense to set one up—a great New Year’s resolution!