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Emails

Types of email

An email value is an internet email address in the form username@host. It is consistent with the address portion of an RFC 822 compliant internet text message (email) address.

The Person Registry supports the following types of email:

Email type Occ Source Description
min:max reg ext user
Primary 0:1 no yes yes Main personal email address
Email Pager 0:1 no yes yes Email pager address
Office Email 0:1 per aff no yes yes Affiliation-specific email
  • Occ: min:max occurrences, where max="n" is no specified limit.
  • Source: reg(istry) = internally generated by Registry/Person rules; ext(ernal) = contributed by external source systems such as Campus PeopleSoft; user = person themselves during self registration or via Stanford.You

Primary Email

Registry Database: table=email, type_cd=general
XML Document: <email type="primary">
LDAP Directory: mail

A person's primary, personal email, or more specifically, that value the individual lists as primary email contact. For Stanford faculty, staff and students, this is often their @stanford.edu sunetid-based email address. No policy requires the listing of an email address or that it be an @stanford.edu address.

Email pager

Registry Database: table=email, type_cd=pager
XML Document: <email type="pager">
LDAP Directory: suEmailPager

Email pager address. Not permitted to students.

Office Email

Registry Database: table=email, type_cd=general, with aff_source
XML Document: <email type="officeemail">
LDAP Directory: suGWAffilEmail[n] (not yet implemented)

An external source contributed email that is associated with an affiliation, usually to guarantee the listing of a site-specific email (e.g., SLAC or Hospital) independent of the personal email listing.

Parts of an email

Each name in the registry is stored as a single row in the email table of the Registry database. An email consists of these parts:

What Required? Schema xml
Type of email yes type_cd <email type="..."> attribute
user yes address <email><user>
host yes address <email><host>

Note that the value is stored in the database as a single integrated string, username@hostname.

Type of email

Type of email per above.

User name

The username portion of the email address.

Host name

The host name or domain name portion of the email address.

Data integration rules

Email from a source to the registry

Email is a shared data type and all forms can be contributed by external systems per individual source agreement.

Names in the registry outbound Person XML document

All email types in the Registry are exported in the document.

Events

Registry/Directory synchronization events

The Person Registry posts an registry_person:reconcile for any change in email data.

Infrastructure person events

The person Slog process that maintains Person data in the Directory posts the following events when directory attributes change. The parms designating the specific data type allow consumers to filter the events to select only changes needed by their system.

Type of name event (domain:topic) parm1
mail person:email primary
suEmailPager person:email pager

No person events are currently posted for officeemail changes since that data is not in the directory.

Last modified December 6, 2019