The following points were communicated by Markus Püschel and by David Basin in their roles as head of the department.
- In professional email interactions the visible email address should be an ETH address, and normally one from our department, i.e. of the form
xxx@inf.ethz.ch. In particular, it should not be an address from Gmail or a similar service. The reason is advertisement in both directions: with every email you advertise inf.ethz; conversely, the address shows that you work at a department and university of good reputation (in contrast, everybody can have a Gmail address).
- If you use Gmail or a similar service, you can configure it to display the ETH address. However, there are good reasons to actually give up such services for work-related communication if you prefer that your email is not stored on company servers. In fact, contracts in projects with industry typically forbid the use of Gmail, Dropbox and the like. For Dropbox we have polybox as a replacement, which hosts files locally and offers more storage.
- Emails to the several mailing lists of the department are manually monitored for non-
inf.ethz.ch addresses, i.e. this creates extra work on our side and it may actually result in significant delays. (We will not add extra Gmail or similar addresses to a white list on demand.)