Summary of Potential Concerns / Pitfalls

• The first notable factor that should be considered before forwarding your email to a Non-University email address is that emails from outside the university are a prime avenue for scams, spam, and phishing emails. Because of this, most users of the email system will automatically regard an email from buckybadger@gmail.com (or any other email domain) to be a non legitimate email even if the sender of the email appears to be a member of the UW. 
  
  
• The second aspect that people should be aware of before forwarding, is that as public employees, our emails are subject to open records requests and by forwarding them outside of the university email system, you could open your personal email to an open records request. While there are limiting factors on said requests, there is no way to know before hand how invasive such a request may be. 
  
  

Forwarding is Unnecessary - Improved Functionality, Granularity, and Organization can be Yours!

• For most email clients, it is not difficult to connect a non UW email account concurrently with your @wisc.edu account. Both Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail are able to do so, which would result that you have a singular place to read and respond to messages from any number of different email accounts. 
  
  
• If you do eventually leave the university at a later date and want to migrate your @wisc.edu email messages with you, it is very easy to copy them into another email account - especially if you have the dual accounts set up as described above. 

Click here for instructions on how to forward your Wisc email to a different email address.