Information Technology Services:

Email Aliases

An email alias is an address that directs mail to one or more email accounts. For instance, helpdesk@mills.edu is an alias that broadcasts your requests for assistance to many staff members in the ITS department. At Mills, there are several categories of email aliases to help you in your daily activities. Among them are aliases that are automatically mainained by our database on a daily basis.  Those include

• Section Aliases
• Course Aliases
• Advising Aliases
• Departmental Aliases
• Other Aliases

All of these aliases are found within the Outlook or Entourage address book, indicated by a "book" symbol in your email client.

To look up any of the automatically controlled aliases, simply click on the address book icon in your Outlook, OWA, or Entourage client, and then type the beginning of the description.  For instance, if you are hoping to email "Dance 107, Fall 2009, All Sections," then type "Dance" and select your choice among the entries found.

For detailed information about the construction of alias addresses, please see the following explanation.

Section Aliases

Section aliases serve to allow instructors and students communicate with each other effectively. They appear in the following format:

SubjCrse-Sec

For example, or

Course numbers are always three or more characters and sections are always two characters.

Members of section aliases are only the students enrolled in that particular section and the instructor who teaches it.

Course Aliases

Course aliases allow students and instructors to broadcast messages to all sections of a course and those courses that are crosslisted with each other. In other words, course aliases typically send messages to more people than those in an individual section. These aliases appear in the following format:

SubjCrse

For example, or

Note that the section numbers are omitted. That is the only distinction in appearance. The function is different, however. If BIO001 were crosslisted with BIO101, then sending mail to either of the aliases would broadcast to those enrolled in both courses.

Advising Aliases

Every advisor has an alias that includes all of his or her advisees. Its format is as follows:

Advisees-AdvisorUsername

For example, or

An advisor with the username pteal or jdoe can use the appropriate alias to communicate with all of her advisees at once.

Departmental Aliases

Every department has associated with it a departmental alias. It is in the following format:

Depts-DeptAbbreviation

For example, or

The abbreviations for academic departments can be typically determined by the course subject abbreviation. For administrative departments, however, the abbreviations are not always intuitive. Here is a list of all abbreviations.

Additionally, academic departments have an alias that includes faculty only. It is the same format as the departmental alias with a "-fac" extension.

For example,

Whereas depts-eng sends messages to the entire English department, depts-eng-fac emails only instructors.

Other Aliases

The vast majority of the college's aliases are manually maintained by users. This means that a given user "owns" an alias and controls what email accounts are members of that group alias.

If you would like an alias created, contact helpdesk@mills.edu. They will create one for you, after which time you can visit this page to maintain it.

You can also get to the email alias editor by logging into the Portal and selecting "Email Alias Editor" in the "Other Helpful Links..." section.

Questions?

There are many aliases apart from these that are automatically maintained. If you have questions about those or any of those described above, please contact helpdesk@mills.edu.