MSU Email Environment

Email has become a powerful and efficient communication tool. It is used by the University to provide important and timely information to its employees. And it is used by employees to communicate with students, colleagues and associates both within and outside the Institution. This information will help employees understand and leverage the MSU email environment for maximum effectiveness. Examples are based upon employee John Michael Rackley, an employee in Information Technology Services, ITS.

NetID and NetPassword
Every MSU employee and student is assigned a unique network identifier, or NetID, upon employment or enrollment. It is used to access a variety of information technology services and resources. The NetID consists of a person’s initials followed by a number to make it unique. Employee John Michael Rackley has been assigned the NetID jmr21.

To ensure security and privacy of information, a NetPassword is associated with each NetID. It is a random string of characters chosen by and known only to the employee or student and is used with the NetID when logging in to information systems such as MyBanner or the onCampus Web portal.

University Email Account
Each MSU employee has a university email account of the form NetID@msstate.edu. For example, John Michael Rackley’s university email account is jmr21@msstate.edu. It is important to note that university-generated “mass email” and most “official” university email is sent to the employee’s university email account. Employees should be aware of this and use this email account appropriately. Some employees prefer to read email sent to this account via the onCampus Web portal or an IMAP email client, while others may choose to forward this account to some other email account.

Departmental Email Account
Many employees have at least one other university-provided email account, typically associated with the department in which they work. This is known as the employee’s departmental email account. A departmental email address does not have the same rigid format as the university email address but generally follows the form user@dept.msstate.edu, where user might be an employee’s last name, or first initial and last name, and dept is the name or abbreviation for the unit in which the employee works. John Michael Rackley’s departmental email account is rackley@its.msstate.edu.

Forwarding the University Email Account
As was previously stated, each employee chooses how they wish to read email sent to their university email account. For instructions on forwarding one’s university email account to some other account, see “Forwarding Your University Email Address”. Since John Michael Rackley prefers to read and process all email at his departmental GroupWise account, he has chosen to forward jmr21@msstate.edu to rackley@its.msstate.edu.

Preferred Name
Employees who go by something other than their first name can choose a preferred name. The document, “Specifying Your Preferred Name”, has complete instructions on how to do this. John Michael Rackley goes by Mike, which he has selected as his preferred name in Banner Web. If a preferred name has been specified, it can be used to form an alias address for one’s university email account, as shall be described in the next paragraph.

University Email Alias
Employees may choose an alias for their university email address. The alias consists of one or more parts of the employee’s first, middle and preferred names separated by periods, together with the complete last name. Once an alias is created, it can be used interchangeably with the netid@msstate.edu email address. It is important to note that the alias only applies to an employee’s university email address, not his or her departmental address.