Automatic email forwarding for MHC faculty and staff limited to Five College email addresses

Overview

The College’s Data Handling Procedures hold that faculty and staff are prohibited from automatically forwarding their MHC email to email addresses outside of the Five Colleges. 

To enforce this, LITS has put in place email routing rules (starting 10/31/2025) that block automatically forwarded emails from MHC faculty and staff to non-Five College institution email addresses. 

Faculty and staff may still manually forward individual emails as needed without running into this restriction. 
 

Issue

Users with automatic forwarding that doesn’t adhere to the procedures will receive a “Delivery Status Notification (failure)” email for each blocked email that says:

Automatic email forwarding from MHC faculty and staff email accounts to email addresses outside of the Five Colleges is prohibited by MHC’s Data Handling Procedures.

Turn off forwarding to stop the failure notices. 
 

Resolution

Remove your automatic email forwarding rules to email addresses outside of the Five Colleges to stay in compliance with the College’s Data Handling Procedures and prevent “Delivery Status Notification (failure)” emails.  

How to turn off blanket automatic forwarding:

1. On your computer, open Gmail.
2. Sign in to your MHC Google account.
3. In the top right, choose Settings and then See all settings.
4. Select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP or Forwarding tab.
5. In the "Forwarding" section, choose Disable forwarding.
6. At the bottom, select Save Changes.

How to stop email filters that auto-forward:

If you have an automatic forwarding rule set up for a subset of your emails, that will also need to be removed. 

1. On your computer, open Gmail.
2. Sign in to your MHC Google account.
3. In the top right, choose Settings and then See all settings.
4. Select Filters and Blocked Addresses.
5. Locate the rule that forwards email outside of the Five Colleges.
6. Choose delete in the far right.