Email

Overview

UC Santa Barbara uses Google services for mail, calendaring, and collaboration. See the UCSB Connect site for more information. As Connect Departmental Administrators, we can help set up and customize these resources to best meet the needs of our users.

Mailing Lists

Membership in departmental aliases is based on departmental affiliation and position.

To send a message to any list (i.e., seminars@lifesci.ucsb.edu), you need to send it from the account that's subscribed to the list. You cannot, for instance, send a message from your personal email account to a list to which you're subscribed using your lifesci account.

Also, with the move to Connect Google Groups, when someone posts to a list to which they belong they will not receive the message in their Inbox. This is a Google Groups feature so it's best to cc or bcc yourself so you can see when it's delivered.

Business Aliases

These are reserved for official university business and mandatory membership is based on a user’s affiliation with the campus. These types of notices include information about emergencies, power outages, updates from the University administration, information regarding merit increases, etc, as well as departmental information. The primary business aliases are EEMBbusiness and MCDBbusiness.

News Aliases

These are for general purpose announcements of a non-business nature. Appropriate content for messages sent to the BIOnews alias include housing opportunities (or roommate searches), items for sale and announcements of social events. Membership in the BIOnews alias is voluntary and users can subscribe or unsubscribe via the Google Groups page.

Spam / Phishing

Spam

Unsolicited, bulk email. Email addresses are collected from websites, chat rooms, a user's email address book and other means.

Phishing

An attempt to solicit usernames and passwords from people. Common phishing practices include e-mails claiming that accounts are about to be closed and requesting submission of usernames and passwords to keep them open or e-mails claiming to be from banks, PayPal or other financial and related institutions insisting that they log in to perform some action.

 GRIT and reputable financial institutions will never ask for your password. Please do not give your username and password to anyone.

Preventing Spam & Suspicious Emails

Suspicious Emails

Forward any suspicious emails to help@grit.ucsb.edu if you'd like our team to take a look.

Reporting Spam & Phishing

In the GMail web client, view the message and then select "Report Spam" or "Report Phishing" as appropriate using the three dots menu in the upper right corner. Reporting Spam can also be done from the Inbox by selecting the message and clicking the Report Spam (Stop sign with ! icon) button.

Aliases, Functional Accounts and Google Groups

Aliases

Email aliases are alternate addresses that can be used to send and receive mail from a single account. For example: Joe Gaucho (joegaucho@ucsb.edu) could be assigned departmental aliases joe.gaucho@dept.ucsb.edu and gaucho@dept.ucsb.edu . To view your currently assigned aliases in the GMail web client: Gear icon > See All Settings > Accounts.

Functional Accounts

Functional Accounts are separate mailboxes set up for use by individuals or groups. Functional Accounts are well-suited for roles that may experience turnover that need to retain a consistent email address and history. Functional accounts take the form dept-username@ucsb.edu , but as with individual Connect accounts, we can attach other email aliases as needed.

Google Groups

A Google Group is a mailing list, a single address that will deliver messages to all members of the group. Google Groups can also be used to extend calendar invitations to a group, or to help manage permissions on files or folders within Google Drive.

Resource Calendars

Resource calendars are set up to allow users to reserve things like meeting rooms, lab spaces, or instruments via Google Calendar with their Connect account. Most meeting spaces have already been set up as resource calendars. See our Tutorials section for more information.

 For questions regarding any of the aforementioned items, or if you would like to set something up please contact help@grit.ucsb.edu.