Peacock Mail | Email for the Saint Peter's College Community

All students, faculty and employees will be using Peacock Mail and Google Apps.

Initially, the College will be offering Google Docs, Google Chat, Google Mobile, Mail (Peacock Mail) and Google Calendar.  Additional Apps will be evaluated in the future based on demand.

Under our contract, Google will protect Saint Peter’s College’s data with the "same standard of care with which it protects its own confidential information." Google will disclose College information only when required by law, and then only after giving the College the opportunity to challenge the disclosure request.

FERPA-Protected Information
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects the privacy of a student’s education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education, and applies to all records directly related to a student and maintained by college. For example, highly sensitive information about a student such as Social Security or credit card numbers, and student grades should never be stored in Google, in accordance with FERPA and the Saint Peter’s College Acceptable Use of Information Technology Resources policy governing the use, transmission, and storage of highly sensitive information. Student grades, for instance, are best stored in a secure course management system. More information about FERPA rules can be found on the US Department of Education site.

Acceptable Use
Students using a Google account will have access to the Google Apps for Education suite of applications, including e-mail, personal calendars, and collaborative document sharing (at a future date). Because of the collaborative nature of Google Apps, there are several caveats and circumstances about which students must be aware.

Google Apps for Education Are Not Hosted by ITS
Having a Google Apps account means that your e-mail is transitioned away from Saint Peter’s College hosting and is now being hosted by Google. Because ITS does not host Google's e-mail (Gmail), or any other documents created in Google, we are not able to maintain or secure the content in Google Apps. Individual users must be responsible for making backups of and securing any content they choose to place in the Google Apps domain. For example, ITS cannot recover an accidentally deleted file or e-mail, nor will Google provide this service. Please visit the Google Mail for Education website for various methods of backing up.

Intellectual Property Rights
Students are responsible for protecting all intellectual property placed in Google Apps for Saint Peter’s College.

Highly Sensitive College Information
Saint Peter’s College’s Acceptable Use policy governs the use, transmission, and storage of highly sensitive information, such as social security or credit card numbers. Highly sensitive information, including student grades, should never be placed in Google Apps. Secure course management systems should be used instead.

Participation of External Users
Google Apps users can invite other Google Apps users, both within the College and outside the College, to view data, co-edit documents, and use other collaboration tools. Since ITS has no administrative access to Google Apps data, it is the responsibility of each user to ensure appropriate controls are used to prevent accidental or undesirable file sharing.

Yes. The message size limit is 25MB including any attachments.  Google Apps is designed to simplify file sharing by providing links to shared content rather than including it as an attachment, in order to ensure that people will be working, and collaborating on the newest version.

No.  Your private account and institutional accounts will not be merged. Additionally, you will not be able to access your Peacock Mail account via the Google personal edition interface such as www.gmail.com.

Please do not reply to messages like this.  SPC ITS will never ask you for personal information in an email.  If you have any questions, please contact the helpdesk before replying to any suspicious email.

Nothing.  One of the benefits of Peacock Mail is that students will be given lifelong email.

There may be difficulties in viewing or receiving information from College systems in some foreign countries. This challenge exists regardless of the service provider. Users are encouraged to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, which may, in some cases, lessen the difficulty.

It is the plan that full calendar sharing will be allowed within the college and that free/busy information will be sharable with external calanders.

Google uses "labels" instead of folders to organize e-mail. You can assign multiple labels to a message.