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Using an External E-mail Account

If you have a different e-mail account that you prefer to use instead of your UCSF e-mail account, you can connect to our mail server so that e-mail from your UCSF account appears in your other e-mail account. The University discourages this practice.

Please reconsider

We strongly recommend that you do not use an external e-mail account because:

  1. You lose valuable productivity features. Outlook, Entourage, and Outlook Web Access provide integrated services which are not available when you use an external e-mail account. For example, you would not have access to the UCSF address book, which enables you to easily look up contact information for people you study and work with.

  2. It opens you to potential financial liabilities. Federal and state laws and University policy require you to abide by information security policies to protect confidential information.

    If you use an external e-mail account and a colleague of yours happens to send you unencrypted confidential information in e-mail, you could be violating federal and state laws and University policy because that information was exposed to a party that was not authorized to have access to the data. (It doesn't matter if Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft says that they'll keep your data secure -- what matters is if you can legally bind them to the same information security requirements, and you cannot.) If applicable, you will be held personally liable -- up to $250,000 per violation.

    As a medical sciences professional, the responsibility for protecting confidential information lies individually with you and the choices you make when handling data, not just now as a student pharmacist, but also beyond graduation. More details: Information Security.

  3. You can't send e-mail securely. External mail systems do not work with the UCSF Secure E-mail system. So to send a secure message, you need to remember to log in to your UCSF e-mail account before sending the message with Secure: on the subject line.

How to use an external e-mail account with UCSF e-mail

Use the connection settings at POP/IMAP Connection to Mail@ucsf to configure your external e-mail account to connect to the UCSF e-mail server using either the POP or IMAP mail protocol. If you're not sure which to choose, we recommend IMAP. (What's the difference between POP and IMAP?)

Your UCSF e-mail account is official

We consider your UCSF e-mail address to be the official method for us to reach you by e-mail, even if we happen to have your external e-mail address on file. If you check your e-mail through an external e-mail account, you are responsible for ensuring that you have regular access to that account at all times.

Problems with your external e-mail account?

If a problem with your external e-mail account prevents you from reading or sending your UCSF e-mail, remove or disable your external e-mail account's connection to it and use Webmail to read and send your UCSF e-mail until the problem is resolved.

Need help?

To resolve problems with configuring POP or IMAP, call UCSF Customer Support at 415/514-4100.

More information

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