Non-personal accounts and secondary accounts
There are two types of shared account, non-personal email accounts and secondary accounts. This page describes the difference between them. To set up a non-personal or secondary account, or to change the ownership, please contact the IT Service Desk.
Both these types of account have to be owned by a member of staff or a current student. If the owner's personal account is deleted any shared account which they "own" is disabled. You should therefore make sure you have transferred ownership of your secondary or non-personal accounts before you leave the University.
Members of staff may apply for accounts for shared webspace or email for any group (department, unit, research group, administrative group) with which they are associated. Students may apply for shared accounts in connection with any student society or athletic club that they are an office-holder of, but their application must be endorsed by the Students Association or the Athletic Union.
Secondary accounts
Secondary accounts are used for shared webspace. The advantages of using a secondary account for shared webspace are:
- If you are creating a website for a department, research group or student society, it should not be located in your own personal webspace. If it is, it will become inaccessible when your personal computer account is deleted. A shared website should always be located in shared webspace
- If necessary you can authorise several people to use a file-transfer (FTP) program to upload and modify the contents of the website.
Secondary accounts work as follows:
- The owner nominates a password-holder: usually the owner of the account will be the password holder, but the owner may nominate another user. The password holder is able to access the webspace to upload material to it using the account username and their own password.
- The owner may also nominate other authorised users. Authorised users can access the webspace using a username made up of the shared account username and their own username, and with their own password. For example an authorised user called mmm45 can access the webspace belonging to a shared account pottery with the username pottery-mmm45
- Apply for a secondary web account for a group or society
- Apply for personal web space
- Apply for an official web address on the University web server (only for research groups, etc)
MYSQL databases
- IT Services can set up one or more MySQL databases for use with your society web site. Click here to apply for a MySQL database.
Non-personal email accounts
Secondary accounts are usually not suitable for shared mailboxes. Owners of secondary accounts cannot enable others to access a shared mailbox with Eudora or Webmail. For this purpose you should use a non-personal email account. The features of a non-personal email account are as follows:
- Each non-personal email account has its own password which is not the same as the owner's personal password.
- Owners of non-personal accounts may, at their own discretion, share the account password with others, to give them access to the shared email. Passwords should only be shared with trusted colleagues.
- Passwords for non-personal email accounts can be changed using the same password-changing web page as is used for personal passwords.
- The owner is responsible for ensuring that the account is not used for unauthorised activities; if the account is being misused the owner must change the password immediately and inform the IT Service Desk.
- The owner must ensure that all those sharing the account are agreed on how it is to be used, who is to access it at different times, and how the messages are to be dealt with. Care must be taken to avoid two or more people accessing the mailbox at the same time as this can cause confusion among users, leading to the possible loss of messages. If a message is deleted by one user, it is lost to everyone. In some circumstances two or more people simultaneously accessing an account's mailbox can lead to mailbox corruption. If this occurs emails may be lost permanently.
