OSU provides an ONID email address for all students, faculty, staff, and others associated with the university. Additionally, most faculty and staff also have an Exchange account which may provide their primary email address (which uses the @oregonstate.edu domain).
ONID is a lot more than just email; it gives you access to Blackboard, myOSU, and many other OSU systems. But for students in particular (as well as some faculty and staff), ONID email is their primary email address at OSU.
Most faculty and staff, except some who are employed by COAS, Engineering (COE), or Science (COS), have a Microsoft Exchange email account at OSU as part of a full suite productivity solution. Most OSU staff use their Exchange address, with the @oregonstate.edu domain, as their primarily email address.
There are several differences between an Exchange account and an ONID account.
Information Services works hard to block spam and other malicious emails from reaching you while ensuring that you get the email you should get. Each day, our network receives an average of 1,000,000 emails, and we block between between 60% and 90% of those messages as spam. To learn more about the various tools we use to protect the community, please read Dealing With Spam at OSU.
Still, there are steps you can and should take to protect yourself, as some spam will sneak past our traps.
For information about Exchange mailbox hosting, email lists, and the ways that IS blocks spam at the server level, please see our Mail Services page.
