Email

INTRODUCTION

Email is freely available to DoC staff and students. Please be sure to check your email on a regular basis; it is considered to be the primary method of communicating with staff and students within the Department.

Historically, DoC operated its own mail system separately to the rest of the College. We have now migrated to the College Office365 system, and all new users are setup with Office365 mailboxes from day one.  There's a little information about the old system at the bottom of this web page.

EMAIL ADDRESSES

Your primary email address at Imperial is usually of the form:

In addition, you can also be emailed as:

EMAIL: SO HOW DO I READ IT?

Login as username@IC.AC.UK, with your College password.  You can use other email clients, such as Thunderbird and MacMail, ICT have documented this procedure on their web pages: Go to ICT's Email web pages

HOW TO FIND AN EMAIL ADDRESS

MAILING LISTS

CSG maintains various automatically generated mailing lists enabling users to mail groups of people within DoC, passing this information automatically to ICT. Some mailing lists are restricted to staff only, mainly to avoid people using them to send junk mail. Others can only be used if you are emailing from within the Department. Most lists have a backwards compatible form such as second-year@doc.ic.ac.uk and a new College-compatible form such as doc-second-year@imperial.ac.uk

Students should only send email to mailing lists if you have been given permission to do so, by the Senior Tutor. Staff should take care in which mailing lists they use; if in doubt, consult CSG.

Sending email about trivial issues (e.g. "I've lost my...") to large mailing lists is not only forbidden, but also very unwise -- since the sender may well receive unwanted replies from irate users.

It should be noted that sending mail to a large mailing list places a heavy load on the College mailservers, since it will have to deliver around 1500 copies of the same message.

See the main Mailing lists page for lists of automatically generated lists and their current members.

SOME NOTES OF CAUTION

• Please make sure the address you are sending email to is correct.
• The confidentiality of any mail messages sent is not guaranteed. You should not send material of a private or delicate nature.
• The authenticity of emails that you receive is not guaranteed. Internet email systems provide, at best, minimal guarantees that any given email actually originated from the claimed address. This is especially true if the email was received from a computer system located outside Imperial.

• Note the Departmental regulations and College regulations covering computer use, particularly as they cover the content of emails.

• Outside of the Department, the delivery of email is not guaranteed. It is a very reliable system but you should treat sending an email as you would sending a letter -- very occasionally one can get lost. If delivery is critical then you should consider confirming receipt, either by return of email or a telephone call. You should also bear in mind that some people have very aggressive mail filtering which may cause your email message to be misclassified as spam.

MORE ABOUT THE OLD DoC MAIL DOMAIN

You may, occasionally, see email addresses of the form abcYY@doc.ic.ac.uk (where abcYY is a login) or initial.surname@doc.ic.ac.uk or firstname.surname@doc.ic.ac.uk.

These refer to long-standing DoC users - members of the Department for over 10 years, shall we say.  Email sent to any of these addresses should always end up in the same place -- the College mailbox of the appropriate person.  If you like, in most cases you can simply replace @doc.ic.ac.uk with @imperial.ac.uk and everything should still work.

You may also see email addresses of the form listname@doc.ic.ac.uk (such as all-second-year@doc.ic.ac.uk).  These map onto the equivalent list in the @imperial.ac.uk email domain, in most cases doc-listname@imperial.ac.uk (such as doc-all-second-year@imperial.ac.uk) and everyone really should be using the @imperial.ac.uk forms nowadays!

The old @doc.ic.ac.uk mail domain still exists, but is has been frozen for over 10 years, it exists only for backwards compatility to ensure that email sent to old @doc.ic.ac.uk email addresses is routed on it's way to (usually) a College mailbox.  The DoC email domain will exist in this frozen state for as long as it is needed - most likely, many years to come. Only the Head of DoC could ever decide that the DoC email domain be killed off.