Sending bulk e-mail to students is an important component of the U-Mail service, as it facilitates basic university business. However, bulk e-mailing is considered by many recipients as being "spam": unsolicited and unwanted e-mail from an unknown sender. This is completely analogous to the junk mail you receive in your postal service mailbox.

If U-Mail accounts become a repository for junk mail, they'll end up being of limited value towards the academic needs for which the service is needed. To prevent U-Mail accounts for being the target of such unsolicited e-mail we have created policy to limit bulk e-mailing to the student body.

Requesting a Bulk E-Mail Distribution

We can send bulk mailings to undergrad students, grad students, or both grads and undergrads. We do not provide mailings based on class-level or field of study.

Please submit your announcement at least two business days before your intended delivery date. Although we will make a best-effort attempt to send out last-minute announcements, we can't ensure that such announcements will be delivered as requested.

Read on about our requirements for message content and administrative approval. Once you've made sure your message complies with these guidelines you can submit your request using our Bulk Mailing Request tool.

Content Requirements

• Your message must contain plain text only with no attachments or other formatting. This will ensure that it is readable for the largest possible audience.
• Your message must contain a subject line appropriate to the content of the message body.
• If you want to receive replies to your message you'll need to provide a "Reply To" address.
• The message must contain an e-mail "signature" indicating who sent the message and what campus organization he or she represents.

Administrative Approval

• Your message will need to be approved by a senior officer of the university in the form an informal memo. We need them to certify that they have read our caveats about bulk mailing and approve that your message be sent. For administrative departments this signatory is the vice-chancellor of your umbrella organization; for academic departments the dean of your college or division must sign off. The memo must be a hard copy and contain the text of the message to be sent. The memo should be delivered to the Instructional Computing offices at 1523 Phelps Hall or sent by fax to x8758. It should be addressed to "Manager, Electronic Communications".
• To prevent abuse through overuse, no single organization send more than one bulk-mailing in a week and no more than two bulk-mailings in a month. Make sure that your requests don't exceed this limit.
• The message may not be a duplicate of another message previously sent by the same organization. Only one copy of any given message may be sent.

Bulk Mailing Details

All messages are sent out from the address

    University Announcements <announcements@umail.ucsb.edu>

    The above message was sent as a student announcement.
    Replies to this address will not be read or responded to.

    Subject: your reply has not been read

    The message you replied to was sent by the U-Mail system
    as a university announcement. Replies to this address are
    not read by the author of the original message. Please
    review the contents of the original message and contact
    the actual sender for further information.

Further Questions

If you have further questions about this process, send a note to policies@umail.ucsb.edu.