The following policy statements concern the conditions under which faculty, staff and students are expected to use the University of Washington email system. They do not prevent faculty, staff or students from also using that system for other purposes, e.g., limited private use.

UW Tacoma employees and students are issued a University of Washington NetID and email account. University email communications will only be sent to their University of Washington email address. Faculty and staff are not obligated to respond to students using non-UW email accounts.

Those who choose to forward their emails to a non-UW email address do so at their own risk. The University is not responsible for any difficulties that may occur in the proper or timely transmission or access of email forwarded to any email address, and any such problems will not absolve employees and students of their responsibility to know and comply with the content of electronic university communications sent to UW email addresses. The vagaries of the Internet, spam filters, lack of storage space, and rules set by different Internet service providers, are all additional factors which may result in failure to deliver emails as expected to accounts forwarded to non-UW email systems.

Some UW Tacoma systems are designated to not respond to or accept messages sent from non-UW email addresses; message from non-University addresses will be rejected automatically by these systems. For this reason, all messages sent to any UW Tacoma department and/or personnel should be from a NetID email address that ends in @uw.edu, @u.washington.edu, or @washington.edu.