Changes in the e-mail policy for people without CERN affiliation

When affiliated with CERN, every computing account owner is entitled to have a CERN mail address (e.g. “John.Doe@cern.ch”). However, up to now, this mail address was still valid even after the end of a person's affiliation if the owner declared an external email address (e.g. “John.Doe@gmail.com”) to which all personal CERN emails (i.e. those sent to “John.Doe@cern.ch”) could be forwarded.*

As a result, to use our John Doe analogy, John could continue to write and receive emails ostensibly on behalf of CERN despite the fact that he is no longer a member of the personnel or subject to the CERN Staff Rules and Regulations and the Computing Rules. It is doubtful whether this makes sense.

Therefore, in agreement with departments and LHC experiments at the last ITSRM meeting, all CERN email addresses of people whose affiliation has been terminated more than six months ago will be deactivated on 15 October 2012. For all others, including future leavers, CERN email addresses will be kept in accordance with the normal grace periods, i.e. six months after end-of-affiliation. All affected persons were informed in September 2012 and asked to renew their affiliation if they want to maintain their CERN email address. Current CERN retirees are not affected, for now.

* Nothing will change for those affiliated with CERN as this is particularly useful for those of you who normally use an email service outside CERN, be it with your home institute or with Google, and rarely use the CERN one. CERN staff, however, should refrain from using this feature as the data protection level of the external mail provider is not necessarily as high as CERN's. In addition, there are implications for CERN’s privileges and immunities as an intergovernmental organisation (see our Bulletin article on “Don’t let your mail leak”). Please spare us from deploying technical restrictions on this.

The CERN Computer Security Team in collaboration with the CERN Mail Service