Email Address Policies and Standards for Usernames and Domain Names

Email Address Policies

1. Mercy Corps email accounts are reserved for employees.
2. Exceptions:
a. Interns and volunteers
 May be granted access to intern accounts if their activities on behalf of Mercy Corps warrant it.
 Intern accounts and/or usernames should be readily identifiable as such.
Examples: Generic intern username:
Intern in Colombia intern@co.mercycorps.org
Intern/volunteer in Portland interns@mercycorps.org
Intern/volunteer in Portland rdintern@mercycorps.org
Intern/volunteer in New York geintern@nyc.mercycorps.org
Username with "intern" domain:
Intern in Colombia username@int.mercycorps.org
Intern/volunteer in Portland username@int.mercycorps.org
Intern/volunteer in New York username@int.mercycorps.org
b. Consultants
 May be granted a Mercy Corps email address under specific circumstances
 Accounts will be allocated only for the duration of the consulting contract
c. The supervisor of all interns, volunteers, and consultants must provide:
 Estimate of length of service
 Demonstrated need based on work duties
 Confidentiality Agreement signed by the intern, volunteer, consultant
 Approval of the supervisor's department head

Usernames
1. The standard for username is the concatenation of given name's initial and family name.
 If a username is already in use, either the second letter of given name, or middle name’s initial is
used in addition to the given name’s initial.
 In cultures where a person has only one name, that name may be their username.
 In cultures where given name/family name is not the custom, concatenation of the names that fit
the cultural norm should be applied consistently when creating usernames.
2. The employee's email username is the default account name for access to all Mercy Corps web-based
services which require authentication. Exceptions to the default must be approved by the HQ account
administrator.
3. Usernames may not include special characters such as numbers, periods, ".", or hyphens, "-".
4. Role-based usernames are not acceptable.
 Unique user names are a requirement for security, transparency, and traceability (and at some
point in the legal future, discoverability).
 Alias addresses are acceptable and can be monitored or forwarded to name-specific accounts.
 Exception: "intern" email accounts are permissible – see requirements above.

Domain Names
Since we have registered the domain name mercycorps.org, we have rights to all subdomains in that domain.
This enables us to use a uniform naming convention for domains and email addresses. The degree of
uniformity depends partially on the cooperation of the local office's ISP and the capability of that ISP's mail
host.

Rev. 3.2 1 of 2 18 April 2010

When (and if) we deploy a mail server to a specific office, we will assign a domain name for that office, with
which it can then receive and send email. The domain name (i.e. post office) needs to be unique, so that mail
is routed correctly.
A mercycorps.org subdomain can be implemented with minimal effort at an ISP offering mail services,
although there may be some nominal charge for its configuration change.
Note that this approach involves no incremental costs in domain name registration.
Scenarios are presented below:
1. For main office in country: username@cc.mercycorps.org
where:
cc is the ISO 3166-1 standard for 2-character country abbreviation or 3-character US airport code
(or 2-3 character city code) for offices in the US.
Examples: John Adams in Indonesia jadams@id.mercycorps.org
Lou Berio in Lebanon lberio@lb.mercycorps.org
Henry Gorecki in Seattle hgorecki@sea.mercycorps.org
Kaija Saariaho in DC ksaariaho@dc.mercycorps.org
Harvey Gorecki in Afghanistan hagorecki@af.mercycorps.org

2. For secondary offices with mail servers in country: username@rc-cc.mercycorps.org

where:
rc-cc is the ISO 3166-1 standard for 2-character abbreviation, “cc”, prefixed with
or either the ISO-3166-2 standard regional alpha code or a two or three character lc-cc
abbreviation for the geographic locale of the secondary office agreed upon by the
IT administrator and appropriate country representative. The goal of the prefix is to easily
identify the geographic location of the office in the email address.
Examples: glegeti@mz-pk.mercycorps.org for an office in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan with its own email
server
lharrison@kdz-af.mercycorps.org for an office in Kunduz, Afghanistan with its own email
server.

3. For countries with mail servers in country which elect to use the Gmail hosted services to facilitate access
to email outside of the office: username@cc2.mercycorps.org
where:
cc2 is the ISO 3166-1 standard for 2-character country abbreviation appended with the number 2.
Examples: uchin@id2.mercycorps.org for the secondary address for users with accounts on the in-
country server and via Gmail.

4. For those staff members that are not linked to a specific office, rather than create and maintain a multitude
of subdomains "field" and "hq" are the two designations available.
where:
hq is the identifier for staff based in North America or Europe serving HQ function
field is the identifier for staff based in the field serving HQ function, or NA/EU staff who roam to
various field offices on temporary assignments
Examples: nrorem@hq.mercycorps.org
pschickele@field.mercycorps.org

5. If we have not deployed an email server to the office and/or time is limited to get up and running, a stop-
gap domain can be used in the form: username@mercycorps.org.cc (country code or ISP default).

Examples: tdun@mercycorps.ba
sgubaidulina@mercycorps.bigisp.ge
Rev. 3.2 2 of 2 18 April 2010