Regulation on Automatic E-mail Forwarding

An automatic redirection from the mail servers of TU Dortmund University to a personal e-mail address hosted outside of TU Dortmund University is not permitted.

The official TU Dortmund University e-mail traffic contains confidential data from the university. If automatically forwarded to a private e-mail address, these data are sent via a commercial provider. Consequently, e-mail traffic cannot longer be controlled by the university. As a TU Dortmund University employee, you are obliged to treat data confidentially. However, data secrecy cannot be maintained during automatic forwarding, since e-mails containing confidential data are also forwarded without being filtered. If the e-mail contains personal data, this also may be considered an infringement pursuant to section 6 of the North-Rhine Westphalia Data Protection Act (DSG NRW). Finally, it should be noted that in the event of damage caused by such misuse of data, responsibility lies with the person who has set up the automatic forwarding. Therefore, the restraint of setting up the forwarding also serves to protect employees from such claims.

As a result, the ITMC will not provide any support in setting up automatic forwarding to externally hosted personal e-mail addresses.

Another option is to use the two mail servers (UniMail, Exchange) externally. E-mails can be retrieved from home, for example, and the transfer is protected. Should you have any technical questions, please contact the ITMC Service Desk.

Disclaimer: Please note that the English version is solely provided for information purposes. Solely the German version of this regulation (“Regelung zu automatischen E-Mail-Weiterleitungen“) is the official and legally binding one.