In this day and age of rampant SPAM, the propogation of viruses/worms and the extreme difficulty in determining the actual source of an email sent across the Internet, the course instructor has no choice but to implement restrictions on how email related to the course is to be sent and received. While the policies adopted by the instructor are not official policies of the University, Faculty and Department, similar formal policies are definitely on the horizon.
The course instructor's current policy on the sending and receiving of course-related email is defined as follows:
All emails pertaining to a course and sent by students officially registered in the course must be originate from the address $USER@ucalgary.ca where $USER is the username of a computer account that the student has applied for and received from the University of Calgary IT Department. Students who do not have an IT computer account must obtain one. Not having an IT computer account is not to be used as an excuse for sending email from some other source. Email from other sources may be left unread for long periods of time and/or discarded if it appears to be SPAM. The course instructor is not responsible for lost or unread email that results from SPAM filtering, performed electronically or manually. All email received from the "ucalgary.ca" domain is generally accepted and read by the course instructor as long as the subject field contains text that is appropriate and meaningful.
All emails sent by the course instructor to students registered in the course will be sent as a reply to an email received, which should have originated from the student's IT email account in the "ucalgary.ca" domain. The course instructor will not maintain an address book or other form of database for student mail addresses and until a student actually sends email, the address of a student will be unknown. Course related email will not be sent to a mail account which is outside of the "ucalgary.ca" domain. More sensitive information, such as student grades, will not be sent via email in any situation.
All emails are to be sent and/or received in plain text format and if complete programs written in the relevent language or complete files pertaining to an assignment are sent, they must be included as an attachment, also in plain text format unless the information contained therein is not conducive to it (if a binary file is sent it should be sent as an attachment without any attempt to reformat it). Emails that are sent in a non-text format will not be read until the actual contents of the email have been ascertained. The course instructor will always respond using a plain text message format.
Note that the policy restricting the format to plain text only has been put in place so that everyone will be able to read their email without having to worry about whether or not the mail handler they are using can accept whatever non-text format the email may be in. It is not appropriate for an email sender to assume that a receiver's mail handler can accept any particular format(s) unless formal agreements, policies or regulations are in effect. If a worldwide default format is thought to exist it is certainly plain text and as a consequence of that, the formal policy that is in effect in courses taught by the instructor is to use plain text only in the body of an email message. The intended message should never be sent as an attachment if the sender expects it to be read as soon as possible.