Getting started with Email
Oxford University's IT services provides email to all members the university. This service is referred to as Nexus365 and it provides email, calendaring and access to a number of other Microsoft Office 365 applications including OneDrive for Business, Teams, Forms, Delve and Skype for Business. When getting started with Nexus365 please ensure you know how to access your email via web interface, or via email client software such as Outlook, or via mobile phone app. Please also take time to investigate all the Office 365 applications, especially downloading and installing the apps for Teams and OneDrive onto your computers and maybe also your mobile phones.
Email addresses
All members of Department have a University e-mail SSO (single sign-on) account and should use their University email address for university correspondence.
Undergraduate students are registered by their colleges and only have a college address (in the form firstname.lastname@college.ox.ac.uk).
Postgraduate students have a college address (in the form firstname.lastname@college.ox.ac.uk) plus a department address (firstname.lastname@materials.ox.ac.uk) and both addresses are delivered to the same SSO account. Postgraduate students are recommended to change preferred sending email address to the @materials address.
Department staff without College affiliation just have a Department address (firstname.lastname@materials.ox.ac.uk).
University email addresses can be looked-up using the Oxford University contact search web-page.
Contact help@it.ox.ac.uk if you have any queries about your email addresses such as wanting to have aliases set up to reflect the name by which you are more commonly known (for example Tom instead of Thomas).
Email maillists
All members of Department are added the departmental maillist called notices@materials.ox.ac.uk and are also added to other lists as appropriate (e.g. undergrads, postgrads, fellows etc.).
Please review the full list of all departmental email circulation group maillists.
Email signatures
Most members of department find it useful to configure their email client to automatically add a signature to the bottom of all new emails. The purpose of the email signature to provide the recipient some additional information about you, such as your status or job role, your address or affiliation and any alternative contact details e.g. phone, website, social media links etc. Please note that an email signature needs to be configured separately on each email client software that you use to send messages (e.g. web interface, computer email client, phone email client).
Please see the further guidance on the email signatures under Communications along side the branding logos which could be included in your email signature.
Email etiquette
A review of problems with email communications within the department highlighted the following areas:
- Please write messages clearly and concisely. A lot of time is wasted scanning messages for key facts.
- Please do not blindly forward messages without first editing the content to be clear and concise and to take account of the new intended recipient(s).
- Please avoid using attachments for simple information that could be in the text of the email.
- Please try to avoid using formatted text. (Note that many browsers can be incorrectly configured to automatically send all messages as formatted text which then appears as an attachment to some people. People encountering these problems should alert either IT staff or the senders who are probably unaware of the problem.)
- MOST people can cope with Word attachments, but for some users this requires several minutes of messing around since not everyone uses a PC/Mac with MSWord to read their mail. Please be considerate. (large attachments >10Mb should be distributed as a link using onedrive to avoid filling the recipient's mailbox)
- Most people ignore automatic requests for notification or receipt, so please do not use them! If you require confirmation of receipt, ask for one in the message.
- Please use vacation message (out of office) settings if you are not checking mail for more than a couple of days. It helps people know that they are not going to get a reply to their urgent message. However spammers can use vacation messages automatic replies as confirmation that their address lists are valid.
- Please would Admin Staff / Committee Chairmen try to avoid duplication of circulations by both email and paper, or at least notify if paper copy will follow the email in order to avoid wasted printouts.
- Ignore / immediately delete unsolicited junk mail or financial scams. See advice on automatic filtering of junkmail
- Check the contents of your Junk Email folder at least weekly just in case official emails have been incorrected identified as junk.
- Hoax virus notification messages are common. Do NOT follow 'disinfection' instructions unless you are sure of the authenticity of the advice. If unsure forward the message to a member of IT staff
- Please note that Department Mailists are intended for circulating information relevant to the department. They should not be used for advertisements or personal messages without prior authorization.
- In order to reduce the number of messages sent to all members of department via the notices maillist please consider circulating the information via the weekly departmental newsletter.
Users may also like to read the IT Services email netiquette advice.
