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All current Virginia Tech students, staff, faculty, retirees (before June 1, 2023), and alumni are provided with a Virginia Tech Google Workspace for Education account. However, the services available to you depends on your affiliation with the university. Please see Understanding Storage and Services for Google and Microsoft Based on Constituent Groups for more information about which services you will receive with this account. Your account remains active if you are:
If you have none of these relationships with the university, your account will be closed, and all data deleted. Please make arrangements ahead of time to advise friends and colleagues of an alternate email address, retrieve your personal correspondence, and direct any university records or business correspondence to the appropriate recipient.
Currently, the Virginia Tech Gmail system runs IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) for connections to the mail server. Since the messages are stored on the server, deleting messages from any synced clients or devices will also delete them from the server and from any other synced clients and devices. Email messages do not expire from the server.
Please be aware that Virginia Tech does not monitor email. However, if asked to do so by a law enforcement agency by warrant, the system administrators do have the ability. For more information on acceptable use of information systems, refer to the Acceptable Use Policy.
Additionally, the Student Life Office, the Office of Student Conduct, and the Virginia Tech Women's Center all handle questions of abuse of the Information Systems Acceptable Use Policy. Student Life and the Women's Center can assist students by asking the postmaster to monitor the email of a student who has been accused of harassing another individual over email. In these cases, Gmail administrators do not actually read the mail but, instead, watch for mail sent to the individual they are accused of harassing. The email is then sent to the Student Life Office or the Women's Center who can send it to the Office of Student Conduct for adjudication at the student's request, if the harasser is a Virginia Tech student.
You can contact the staff in the Dean of Students Office at (540) 231-3787 or the Virginia Tech Women's Center at (540) 231-7806 for assistance and options for addressing the situation. The Office of Student Conduct also has staff that can provide confidential information as to how they adjudicate such cases. You can contact the staff in the Office of Student Conduct at (540) 231-3790.
See Google Workspace for Education (vt.edu) for information regarding data storage compliance.
See Sending Email to a Random Sample of VT Addresses for information regarding mass email procedures.