Etiquette with regard to email consolidation Background: I am a fourth year math graduate student in the US.

I currently have three active email accounts: personal (gmail), graduate university (windows live), and undergraduate university (also windows live).  Shortly after I began graduate school, I set up the latter two accounts to forward everything to my gmail account.  I vastly prefer gmail's interface to that of windows live, so I almost never even sign into the other two.

I coordinate a student seminar within our department, so I regularly send email messages to the department's list of graduate students.  In an effort to prevent people from spamming that group, the department secretary must approve all messages before they are passed onto the list.  After I sent a message last week, I was reprimanded for not sending it from a university account.  This exchange led me to the following questions:


Do universities/departments ever a formal policy in place about the use of "non-official" email accounts?
Do people find it personally bothersome when colleagues don't use their university account for professional correspondence?
Is there anything I absolutely should not send via a "non-official" account?  (There's a good chance FERPA could be involved here...)


Any responses to these questions or related comments are much appreciated.

Note: I am aware that options exist within gmail that allow it to send email via another account that I own.  It is likely that this will probably be my solution to this problem, but the question I'm specifically asking is about the ramifications of continuing to send mail without the use of this feature.
Do universities/departments ever a formal policy in place about the use of "non-official" email accounts?


Yes, at least in Europe most universities seem to at least frown upon using gmail etc. in professional contexts. Whether there is a formal policy against it will differ from place to place. I would not even be able to tell in my current university, as the thought has not really crossed my mind so far. However, our department head is occasionally reminding people informally that they are expected to be using their official mail addresses.

That being said, whether universities with a formal policy exist isn't overly important for you. You should primarily care whether your university has such a policy, and this we cannot answer for you.


  Do people find it personally bothersome when colleagues don't use their university account for professional correspondence?


Yes, I personally find it somewhat unprofessional, although I have no particularly strong feelings on this. I do occasionally wonder why people who clearly have an official account of my university specifically choose to send emails to collaborators and students via an account like cookiemonster93@gmail.com. It can't be that they prefer the gmail user experience, because, as you say yourself, it is very easy to use gmail also with non-gmail accounts.

However, note that even using the gmail web client as a frontend for your regular university accounts may already be a breach of policy. At least here in Switzerland, universities are not happy about the mailings of their employees being uploaded to Google (but then again they certainly wouldn't use Windows Live either, so maybe your universities care less about data privacy than the ones over here).


  Is there anything I absolutely should not send via a "non-official" account? (There's a good chance FERPA could be involved here...)


I'm not in the US, so I cannot comment on FERPA, but in my university basically everything that has to do with students, assignments, tests, or grades needs to be sent encrypted with the certificate that is bound to our university identity. This also automatically excludes sending it over a different mail address. Every "official" communication needs to at least be sent digitally signed using said certificate, which again excludes other mail accounts.