School of Crystallography - Email addresses

Format of email addresses

Members of the School of Crystallography should all have email aliases in the following forms.

This list is in order of preference.

  1. I.Name@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
  2. I.Name@cryst.bbk.ac.uk
  3. LoginID@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
  4. LoginID@cryst.bbk.ac.uk
  5. I.Name@HostName.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
  6. LoginID@Hostname.cryst.bbk.ac.uk

All the above addresses are equivalent with the possible exception of the @HostName.cryst.bbk.ac.uk form which is STRONGLY discouraged.

Some people have an mail alias of the form I.Name@bbk.ac.uk however the use of these addresses is not recommended.

Reasons not to use the I.Name@bbk.ac.uk addresses

The mail aliases of the form I.Name@bbk.ac.uk were created to make it easer for the administrative sections to contact staff and to support college wide staff mailing lists. Mail sent to an I.Name@bbk.ac.uk address is delivered to the college mail hub where it is either stored for collection or forward to those schools which run their own mail servers.

Drawbacks of the I.Name@bbk.ac.uk include

  • Only people who appear in the staff database will have an address. It could be confusing for external correspondents if only some members of a research group can be contacted at I.Name@bbk.ac.uk.
  • Once an email address has published (for example in a journal) it can not be easily changed and may need to remain valid for a considerable time. It is not uncommon for people to continue to receive email at the department long after they have left. This may cause problems after a member of staff has left and the I.Name@bbk.ac.uk address deleted.
  • All I.Name@bbk.ac.uk mail is delivered to the college mail server and then forward to the crystallography mail server. Any problems on the college mail server will cause extra delays.
  • With the large number of staff in the college there is more chance that two or more people have or had the same Initial and Name.
  • In a small number of cases the I.Name part of the @bbk.ac.uk address may not agree with that used in the @mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk addresses. This can cause the first few messages send to @bbk.ac.uk to bounce.

CCSG Comments, Corrections, Changes School Home page

$Revision: 1.4 $ $Date: 2001/09/13 16:36:44 $