Always use your UW email address for all UW-related emails

Sending email for UW-related work from your Gmail account or other non-UW accounts is a bad idea for a number of reasons....

People can't confirm who you are - e.g., anyone in the world can set up the email address mzanna@gmail.com and we don't really know it's Mark unless we ask him. Especially if you are dealing with confidential information, you probably don't want to expect people to reply to what is effectively an anonymous account.
Similarly, for your personal safety, you probably don't want people messin' with your computer accounts or other personal information based on requests coming from random email addresses that might happen to look similar to your name.
You are making extra work for us. Because of the above, when we receive an email from you at a non-UW email address, we click reply, and since the "To" field at this point contains your non-UW email address, we need to search WatIAM to look up your @uwaterloo.ca and manually copy and paste that into the "To" field.
Individuals also would need to keep track of your non-UW address for future emails and prey that someone doesn't forge something similar (such as mpzanna@gmail.com) which we might assume is correct if we vaguely remember Mark had sent something earlier from gmail - again we have no way of verifying unless we ask if he really sent it.
For many things we need to know your UWuserid. If you send email using your UW email address, we can simply glance at your return address to get it. If you send it from another account, we need to do a separate search which takes time.
Email to department mailing lists will not be delivered unless you use your @uwaterloo.ca email address.
Using a non-UW account makes it difficult for people to search for your past messages. If you always use your same @uwaterloo.ca address so that multiple searches don't need to be done. It's especially important if your gmail address is something like myfishhiccups@gmail.com which doesn't reflect a portion of your name. If people are emailing to your UW address and you are replying with a non-UW address, it's can be a pain to track things down as multiple searches need to be done.
And, probably because of the above points and others, it's university policy to use UW email addresses for UW-related work: http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocist/emailuse.html

If you use Gmail, you should set it up so that any UW-related emails that you send will have your @uwaterloo.ca email address as the return address. To do this:

Login to Gmail, click the Options (gear) icon in the top-right and select "Mail Settings", then the "Accounts and Import" tab.
Under Send mail as, click "Add another email address" and add your @uwaterloo.ca address.
Select Use Gmail's servers to send your mail (this is easier to set up).
Click "Next Step >>" and then click "Send Verification" and verify the message.

Once you've done the above, you can then pick your UW address from the drop-down menu in the 'From:' field when you compose a message.

This ends up being a trivial step for you when sending emails, but it makes life easier for everyone receiving your emails.

Another thing you can do to make it easier for yourself is to configure gmail so that if someone sends an email to your UW address, it will automatically place your UW address in the From field when you reply. To set this up:

Login to Gmail, click the Options (gear) icon in the top-right and select "Mail Settings", then the "Accounts and Import" tab.
In the section "Send mail as" / "When replying to a message" select the option to "Reply from the same address the message was sent to". Obviouly you will have to "Add another email address" as described earlier for this to work as desired.

Anyway, if you can do us a favour and stick to your UW address for emails to Bill, Carlos, Sharon, Rita, Heather, Theresa, Sherry, Marg, Mark, Colin, Helen, our coops, the ACO and IST, HR, students you are TAing, other UW faculty/Staff/students/depts/offices on campus, research collaborators, research clients and subjects, we'd all greatly appreciate it.

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