All requests for new faculty and staff accounts (and for account modification) go through the HelpDesk, though HR also keeps copies of the required forms. Once the paperwork is complete, the new account request is submitted to the technical staff. Typically, the account is created within 48 (business) hours of submission. If you'll need an email account right away for a new employee, submit the request before he or she starts work!

All Morehouse employees are eligible for accounts, whether they are full-time permanent, short-term temporary, or anything in between. Accounts for contractors are handled on a case-by-case basis, but generally the contractor's desire for one indicates other factors which recommend that it be granted.

Email accounts are created for all enrolled students at the beginning of each semester based on records from the Banner student information system. Every student should have an email account.

Students who need email account information or who are not sure they have an account should contact the office of Information Services, Tech Tower, Room 333.

Faculty/staff account names tend to take the form of first-initial last-name, cut off at 8 characters. So, if you're Bill Clinton, you can expect an account name of "wclinton". Albert Einstein would get "aeinstei". In the event of a conflict, the HelpDesk will contact the user making the request and try to work something out. (We prefer injecting other initials or rearranging the "normal" pattern to things like adding "2".) All accounts are @morehouse.edu.

Student account names are derived from the full name of the student involved and are generated automatically by the Banner system. In practically all cases, student email usernames are the same as that student's Banner/Tigernet ID. Sometimes they get hairy, since we have lots of similarly-named students: Bill Clinton might end up being wicli83. All accounts are @students.morehouse.edu.

Temporary accounts for faculty and staff can be established through the HelpDesk. Once the predetermined amount of time elapses, server magic disables the account and notifies the HelpDesk. After an unspecified period of time, normally about a week, the account is deleted. This buffer is built in so that users can realize something's amiss and contact the HelpDesk to avoid deletion if they did not leave when expected!

Please keep track of temporary accounts at the department level. Many temporary employees have gone permanent then wondered where their accounts went. Since nobody told the HelpDesk that the user was no longer scheduled to depart, we didn't know not to nuke them.

Role aliases are available for what InfoTech considers to be valid purposes. A good example of this would be something like "herbology@morehouse.edu", to reach the general herbology office. Essentially, it's a pointer from the chosen name to a single individual. For instance, "postmaster@morehouse.edu" points to the network admin's email account (he's the electronic postmaster). Departments wishing to have an alias such as this should know that changes may be necessary to whatever departmental lists they have on the server.

Role accounts are generally discouraged, but special circumstances may warrant their creation. A role account is used when several people need access to the mail sent to a specific address, but that mail needs to be read and handled exactly once. Contact the HelpDesk if you think you need this; we'll try to talk you into a role alias, instead, but will make a role account if it's really justified.

Normally, Morehouse accounts get mail only at their account name's address. That is, wclinton@morehouse.edu only gets email at that address. However, a faculty/staff user may request a full name alias like this: Bill.Clinton@morehouse.edu. Mail to that address would be routed to the user's normal account (wclinton). Users should request this through the HelpDesk.

Mailing lists are available for departmental use. If a department or an organization wants a server-side list, it can be requested through the HelpDesk. Server-side lists are useful only when many individual users will need to send to an unknown list of other users. An example of this sort of list is one that sends to every member of the faculty. Lists sometimes are granted for special events notifications. More on lists can be found here.

Account deletion can be requested of the HelpDesk by the user who owns the account, by the user's supervisor, or by the Human Resources office. Deletions requested in this way are processed immediately. Normally, such deletions are requested only when the user ceases to be a Morehouse employee.

Faculty and staff accounts that have been idle for more than six months are eligible for deletion and may be terminated immediately. Normally, though, dormancy sweeps are run a couple weeks into each Fall semester so that faculty who were on sabbatical do not end up losing their accounts.

Student accounts which go unused for six months also are eligible for deletion and may be terminated immediately. Normally, though, dormancy sweeps are performed a couple weeks into the fall semester each year.

Faculty and staff who leave Morehouse are granted three months of forwarding service and an additional six months of ".REDIRECT" service. On request, we'll add forwarders to our systems so that mail sent to your old address will land in the remote account of your choice (presumably your new address). After three months of that, the forwarder will be changed so that it kicks mail back to the sender telling them your new address, but does not actually forward the mail to that address.

This service must be requested through the HelpDesk. If you don't ask, we don't know where to send your mail, so your account simply goes away and mail to your old Morehouse address starts bouncing.

The HelpDesk reserves the right to deny requests of this sort for any reason. Typically, those reasons involve users who were released under unpleasant circumstances or who may have email inbound from sources prone to revealing Morehouse's trade secrets. The user's supervisor has a great deal of say in this and may, in fact, request redirection of a terminated user's mail to himself or herself.