Approved by the IRC on October 21, 2003

The UNT President and Vice Presidents recommend that the following guidelines be adhered to when sending e-mail to large groups of recipients via the GroupWise faculty/staff e-mail system on campus:

1.  Departments, organizations and individuals should be extremely judicious in sending unsolicited E-mail to all faculty and staff using the "UNT GW Directory" group that directs mail to everyone on the GroupWise mail system. Many recipients consider unsolicited messages to be annoying "junk mail," particularly with the recent proliferation of spam coming from off campus. In general, department heads should review any "everyone" message originating from their departments for appropriateness before the message is sent.
2. The GroupWise e-mail system is state property and thus falls under the rules of University policy 8.5, "USE OF UNIVERSITY PHONES, PHONE LINES, FAX MACHINES AND COMPUTERS FOR E-MAIL FOR REASONS OTHER THAN OFFICIAL UNIVERSITY BUSINESS." The policy states that "university telephones (including cellular phones), telephone lines, fax machines, and computers are available for faculty and staff members and student employees to use in carrying out official university business." An exception given in the policy concerns "incidental personal use" of the e-mail system, phones, etc. and allows personal use only when such incidental use does not interfere with an employee’s job performance or result in additional costs to the University. Messages sent to the UNT GW Directory group consume enormous amounts of employees’ time to read and consequently cannot be considered "incidental".
3. As a general guideline, messages sent to everyone using the GroupWise e-mail system should be of sufficient general interest to the UNT community that the messages would be justified as being sent as printed memoranda if E-mail were not available.
4. Some message types are not appropriate for "everyone" delivery because there are alternative means by which to handle the particular distribution. Those types are:

   a. Lost keys, jewelery, etc. – the University Union maintains a Lost & Found department at their 3rd Floor Information Booth that handles these items.

   b. Lights left on in vehicles – the UNT Police Department has records of vehicle registrations on campus and can notify the owner if his/her lights have been left on, so contact the Police Department in these cases.

   c. More than one announcement and one reminder for a single event – Marketing and Communications Department maintains a campus calendar on UNT’s Web site (http://web2.unt.edu/calendar/newindex.cfm) to which anyone can post and publicize an event.

5. The GroupWise e-mail system is intended for faculty and staff communications, while the EagleMail e-mail system is intended for students. Communications regarding student organizations and their activities generally should not be sent via GroupWise unless a sponsoring faculty/staff member sends those communications.
6. Anyone sending a message to large groups of GroupWise recipients should include his/her e-mail address, phone number, and departmental affiliation in the message so that recipients can easily identify the sender.
7. Departments and organizations that make frequent or regular large group mailings are encouraged to maintain their own groups. Messages to these groups should have an introduction indicating willingness to remove an individual from the group if requested by return E-mail. In addition, all large group email should always identify the sender.
8. It is the responsibility of each department to ensure that all employees, including full and part time faculty, staff, and student employees understand and abide by these guidelines.

Complaints about the content of messages sent to the UNT GW Directory group should be directed to the UNT Vice President who is responsible for the department of the person sending the message. The Vice President or his/her designate will decide upon the appropriateness of the message and take any disciplinary action necessary to preserve the intent of these guidelines.

Even when these guidelines are followed on campus, the volume and types of messages that are sent to everyone on campus are such that some GroupWise users don’t want to see any of the messages sent to "UNT GW Directory." To either automatically delete those messages or to move them into a special folder that one can review separate from personally-directed e-mail, one can set up GroupWise rules. Directions for setting up those rules can be found at http://ncs.unt.edu/rules/folder_rule.html.