your.name@qc.cuny.edu: What’s it good for?

UPDATED November 22, 2014.

You know you’re a true nerd if you have more email addresses than you own pairs of pants, and since you started teaching at Queens College you came one step closer to this dubious achievement, now that you have an email address at qc.cuny.edu. It’s likely that you’re not very excited about your institutional email: it’s one more source of information adding to your cluttered digital life, and it might not even be as convenient or familiar as your account on Gmail or Yahoo, or at your former institution.

Yet there are some very good reasons to make a concerted effort to use your qc.cuny.edu email address:

  • Most importantly, your qc.cuny.edu email associates you directly to Queens College as an institution, lending more authority to your correspondence than emailing from a non-institutional account. This applies not just to communications with your students, but also to communications with colleagues within and outside of Queens, especially when emailing about college related matters.
  • Regularly using your college email also makes it easier for people around campus to contact you: your colleagues won’t have to look you up to find your Gmail email, since your qc.cuny.edu email is already available in the directory built into the college email system.
  • You will discover that the directory is a great way to locate not just faculty and staff around campus, but also your students. You don’t need to know the details of their account: type a part of the name you’re looking for in the “To:” field, and let the app do the searching. (Yes, we know: this won’t work well when the person you’re looking for doesn’t have a very unique name. In such cases, you may have to consult your CUNYfirst roster to find the right email address.)
  • If you use your college email, you’re modeling good behavior for your students, which will encourage them to use their college email themselves, making it easier for you and others on campus to reach out to them.
  • No email system is completely safe, but it’s safer to discuss sensitive matters—especially matters that must be kept private by law (like student grades or other academic records)—in an environment where you can seek institutional support if your email archives inadvertently go public.

It’s technically possible to have your college email forwarded to another account.  Forwarding is great for receiving email and for creating a backup of incoming mail. But in general, forwarding is not recommended. For one, when you reply, you end up giving your correspondents two email addresses instead of one, or your reply comes from an unknown email address, which could be confusing for the recipient. Also, when you have your email forwarded, there’s no guarantee that messages being forwarded will reach the intended destination in time or securely.

Maybe the technology is holding you back from using your qc.cuny.edu account. Here are some tips to make living with your QC email a little easier:

First, if you don’t have an account yet, or you need to change your password, all the information you need is at the Queens College Account Management System website (https://cams.qc.cuny.edu/).

The easiest way to check your college email is using the web client, which can be accessed at http://mymail.qc.cuny.edu (students have a different email system). The web client is mobile-friendly, so you can even use it to check your email with your smartphone. You don’t need to install files: all you need is a browser (full disclosure: not all browsers work well with the web client in “full mode”).

There are some additional methods for checking your college email, all of which involve a little more work on your part—but all three help you avoid the heart-stopping warning-footer appended to the bottom of your emails when you use the web client:

  • The most fully-functional way to work with your college email is using the Outlook Client, which should be installed on your college computer (laptop or desktop). It is part of the Microsoft Office suite. There are instructions for setting up the Outlook client to work with QC’s email.
  • You can also access QC email using Mac Mail:  here are some instructions for this method.
  • Finally, you can work with QC email on Android and iOS devices.

Documentation for campus email is available from the Help Desk.

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