What is happening?
The University will be removing the ability to set up automatic email forwarding on your @aberdeen.ac.uk email account by the end of August 2022. This also means that any existing rules you have in place to automatically forward emails externally will no longer work when the change is made. This was agreed by the Information Governance Committee (IGC), chaired by Senior Vice-Principal, Professor Karl Leydecker.
Why is this happening?
Unfortunately, automatic email forwarding is a significant cyber security and data protection risk. Restrictions on this are being implemented across the education sector to ensure security is managed effectively and that data, personal information, or intellectual property is not accidentally or maliciously removed from systems. Your cyber security is very important to the University and so this decision has been taken with your interests firmly in mind.
What should you do?
If you have automatic email forwarding configured, you should remove the rule and review the methods for accessing your @aberdeen.ac.uk email account by the end of August. You can access your account using Outlook on a PC or laptop, or via Outlook Web Access on web browsers, or via Apps available for mobile devices. These options remove the need to auto-forward email by allowing you to access your account with ease.