Your Unity Email Address

NOTE to students: Your Unity email address (see below) is your official campus email address. It will be the only one to which official email communication from NC State will be sent. However, you can use OIT's email forwarding service if you prefer to receive email from NC State at a different address.

NOTE to students and employees: See Email Processes at NC State for more information about your email address and how it is handled.

Your Unity email address is a continuous string of characters with no blank spaces. You can use either of these two formats:

"Long" format: unityid@unity.ncsu.edu
"Short" format: unityid@ncsu.edu

where unityid is your Unity ID. For example, jddoe@unity.ncsu.edu, jddoe@ncsu.edu

If you know someone's Unity ID, then you can send them an email using either of the above formats. Otherwise, you could:

• Ask them to send you an email. Their address will be included with the message's mailing information.
• Call them on the phone and ask for the address.
• Look them up in the University campus directory at http://www.ncsu.edu/directory/.
  NOTE: Campus email addresses are public information, but you can update your listing and delete your email address for privacy reasons if you wish.

General format of an email address

The information in both a postal address and an email address is presented in order from the most specific to the most general. In a postal address, this sequence is top to bottom (addressee, street, city, state, country), while in an email address it is left to right, as shown here:

username@node.domain.extension.cc

The components of this "long" format are:

• username (also known as login, loginID, handle or account) is the unique network "name" of an individual at a particular location. At NC State this is your Unity ID.
  
• node is the name of the computer or computer system on which an individual has an account. Unity is one of the many nodes at NC State. As noted above, you can use the shortened format for your address that does not include the node.
  
• domain is usually the name of the organization that manages the computer or node. In your case the domain is ncsu. Often a domain will have more than one part.
  
• extension is an abbreviation for the kind of organization that maintains the computer. NC State's domain extension is edu, used by all educational institutions. Other extensions include com (commercial), gov (governmental), mil (military), net (network) and org (organization).
  
• cc is the country code. This is not used in a campus email address. It is included in a person's email address only if they are using a country's Internet domain.

Last modified May 21, 2008 by cawalker