Exchange – Addresses and Aliases

Prior to 2012, Carleton email aliases used an underscore separator: jane_doe@carleton.ca. In 2012, the separator was changed to a “.” Any who had an alias with an underscore had that format grandfathered, so that they have two aliases, one with an underscore and one with a period; both forms of their email alias are accepted interchangeably. Any new faculty or staff member will only have the newer jane.doe@carleton.ca format as their alias.

Your actual Carleton Exchange email address is (and has always been): janedoe@cunet.carleton.ca.

However, Carleton had been intercepting outbound messages from the on-premise Exchange 2007 mail server and altering each message’s email header so that it appeared to be coming from the email alias: jane.doe@carleton.ca.

Unfortunately this practice of altering outbound email messages had drawbacks:

• it introduced another point of failure and delay, since it requires all outbound email messages pass through an additional process at Carleton, where the alteration of the email from-address can take place;
• it prevented the use of per-message encryption, as any encrypted messages were flagged as having been “tampered with” when their from-address was altered.
• when the on-premise Exchange 2007 mail server was retired, it would have been difficult to implement for Exchange O365, since it would haved required all outbound messages from this hosted service be first redirected back to Carleton for alteration of their from-address, before then being sent onward to their destinations.

Given these drawbacks and the fact that your email is still always delivered to you, regardless of whether it is addressed to your actual Exchange address, or to your email alias, continuing to intercept and alter the from-address of all outbound email messages was not desirable.

While some of your recipients may “see” your actual Exchange email address, you can continue to include your email alias in your message signatures, on your business cards, and on your web sites. Regardless of which address your recipients use, your messages will be delivered to you. 

When you subscribe to a listserv, it notes your from-address. Depending on when you first subscribed to a particular listserv from Carleton, your from-address could have been any of:

• jane_doe@carleton.ca
• jane.doe@carleton.ca
• janedoe@cunet.carleton.ca

Whichever of those it was, email addressed to it will still arrive in your mailbox. So if all you wish to do is continue receiving emails you need do nothing.

However if you wish to post (i.e. send an email to to your listserv), and you receive a message that you are no longer authorized, you will need to update your email address with the listserv to:

• janedoe@cunet.carleton.ca

Check the bottom of a recent listserv message. Many listservs append instructions or a link for updating your email address.  Worst-case, you can unsubscribe and then re-subscribe to allow you to once more post to your listserv.

See carleton.ca/its/all-services/email/exchange-o365-faq/#calendar