Effective date May 2008
Version number Version 1.0
Last updated 25 February 2011
Policy owner ICTS
Policy approved by ITMT
Table of contents
Purpose

The purpose of this standard is to ensure:

  • all nicknames are unique, remain current and are being attended to,
  • equal opportunity to use a relevant nickname and to prevent exclusion from using a relevant nickname,
  • email RFC compliance, which is required to ensure acceptance of email by other email systems.

The purpose of a nickname is :

  • to provide an email address for a UCT role-based function, which points to an existing mailbox of an individual.

It is not to replace or be used as an additional address for an individual with the purpose of circumventing the UCT email naming standard.

Applicable to

This standard applies to all nicknames allocated to mailboxes on the ICTS owned and managed email systems. (myUCT, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365)

Policy summary

The naming convention used is as follows:

  1. Only alphabetic, numeric and hyphen (-) characters are allowed.
  2. The nickname should not exceed 64 characters.
  3. Nicknames will only be allocated within the @uct.ac.za domain.
  4. The nickname must be unique within the @uct.ac.za domain.
  5. Nicknames for non-unique functions in the organisation will be prefixed with an organisational abbreviation to ensure uniqueness and fair opportunity.
  6. RFC Standard Addresses and generally accepted system email addresses are reserved for use by ICTS (or a unique service provider within UCT) and will not be allocated to other users.
Policy details

The naming convention used is as follows:

1.

 Only alphabetic, numeric and hyphen (-) characters are allowed.
    This is a basic RFC requirement and must be adhered to. No special characters are allowed. e.g.: "ê" or spaces
2. The nickname should not exceed 64 characters.
3. Nicknames will only be allocated within the @uct.ac.za domain.
    With the adoption of the email naming standard UCT decided to support only addresses within the @uct.ac.za domain.
4. The nickname must be unique within the @uct.ac.za domain.
    Uniqueness is a technical requirement for mail to be delivered. Duplication of nicknames could result in all mail to such an address being delivered to one mailbox or being rejected and not delivered.
5. Nicknames for common or similar functions in the organisation will be prefixed with an organisational abbreviation to ensure uniqueness and fair opportunity.
    In order to provide equal opportunity to a relevant nickname where nicknames are allocated for common or similar functions in the organisation; the nickname will be prefixed with an organisational abbreviation, e.g. the nickname helpdesk@uct.ac.za would exclude any other organisational helpdesk unit from using a similar nickname.
    By applying this rule all organisational units could potentially have a nickname related to their function, e.g. ICTS-Helpdesk@uct.ac.za and Law-Helpdesk@uct.ac.za
6. RFC Standard Addresses and generally accepted system email addresses are reserved for use by ICTS (or a unique service provider within UCT) and will not be allocated to users.
  6.1. These are email addresses specific to the administration tasks of IT systems. These addresses are used for system administrators to communicate to other similar systems and to manage generic tasks related to such systems and often have RFC and legal responsibilities associated with them and are standard to each domain, e.g. postmaster@uct.ac.za, webmaster@uct.ac.za and abuse@uct.ac.za.
  6.2. These addresses will not be allocated and are reserved for ICTS only.
  6.3. It is possible to add an organisational abbreviation prefix to such addresses and allocate them to other business units within the organisation. The addresses would not serve the RFC communication but when advertised on a web page would inherit the responsibility associated, e.g. uct-webmaster@uct.ac.za