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. Any delivery date that falls on a weekend or a holiday will be sent the following business day. 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. PLEASE NOTE: If you do NOT receive an email in your inbox after submitting your request, please email announce-request@umail.ucsb.edu.
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.
- 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. Upon submission, an informal PDF memo will be automatically generated which you can have digitally signed, or print and have signed. We need your senior officer to certify they have read our caveats about bulk mailing by approving that your message can 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 PDF memo must be an attached digital copy and contain the text of the message to be sent. Please email the PDF memo (request and approval) directly to announce-request@umail.ucsb.edu.
- 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>
and have the following tagline appended to the message you submit.
The above message was sent as a student announcement.
Replies to this address will not be read or responded to.
Frequently we get replies to messages sent out as bulk mailings. Any replies sent to our bulk e-mail address bounce back with this message:
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.