Within IT shared services units we have been trying to address UF’s auto-forwarding policy by directing people to use UF Exchange mailboxes when we find UF official business and deliver-to addresses that are in violation to the policy. We regularly run into situations where people prefer to use third party email services instead of UF email addresses and mailboxes. It has been said that UF requires UF business to be conducted through a UF email address but is this documented anywhere? Can we actually point to something when asked “show me that in writing”?

It turns out we can’t because it isn’t actual UF policy.

Amy Hass in the General Counsel’s office has replied that:

We don’t have a current university regulation that requires UF email business be conducted on UF email. Like you guys, I strongly think we should have such a general policy for many many reasons, but 2 things are important to note here:

1. It’s not currently a UF policy to do university email business on your @ufl.edu accounts, yet any UF records (emails, etc) created on non-UF systems (Google, etc), must still be kept for the required retention periods and are absolutely within the purview of public records laws; and
2. The General Counsel’s offices does NOT make policy. The auto-forwarding is not a GC policy. It is a university policy regarding email forwarding.

In the UF Privacy Policy it states: “UF business-related e-mail may not be auto-forwarded or otherwise transferred to non-ufl.edu accounts, including but not limited to, e-mail services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.”

When the auto-forwarding policy was released there was a lot of discussion at various meetings about how it was poorly worded. There was supposed to be an update to the policy made at some point but it never materialized. I’ve once again suggested an update to this policy to address these exact issues. Unfortunately, at this time we do not have anything stronger in UF policy other than the prevention of auto-forwarding or otherwise transferring UF messages to non-ufl.edu accounts. If we can get something more strongly written into UF policy it will be much easier to address this issue internally between the faculty and UF IT workers.

I will continue to represent the idea that the current auto-forwarding policy does not go far enough in protecting UF communication and should be amended. It has been stated that this issue will be taken to the COO for further consideration.