Mail Forwarders

Quite often a mail address will be of the form

mail user@company.type_of_organization

For example,

mail claude.cantin@nrc.ca

This obviously does not follow the above discussion on Machine Naming Convention.

In such cases, mail is sent to a central mail forwarder (in the above example, nrc.ca), which then forwards the mail to user within the organization.

At NRC, user tends to be the user's first name, followed by a period, followed by his/her last name (ex: Claude.Cantin). This convention makes it easy for people to send mail to an NRC employee.

Another advantage of using that method is that when an employee is transfered to another department, no electronic mail address needs to be changed: only the entry in the mail forwarder needs to be modified. This alleviates the problem of contacting all colleagues to let them know of the change of address.

This method is also used by all organizations with an installed firewall (a firewall is the result of a procedure used to isolate a local network from the Internet; this is usually done for security reasons).