This field records the graduates personal email address.

All

Where multiple email addresses for a graduate are known, then provided these remain accurate for the graduate, it is recommended these are all returned to give HESA additional opportunities to contact the graduate. All contact details should be current and be the personal contact details for the graduate as provided and verified by that graduate. This can be determined by recent contact with the graduate via this contact detail.

Providers should be focused on returning the best contact details that they hold for a graduate, therefore, it is recommended that a maximum of 3 contact details are returned for each of the different types of contact detail.

We require a personal email to be returned. This provides HESA with the best possible route for contacting the graduate.

Email addresses for the following third parties are not permitted: Agents or recruitment agency, companies that support international students studying abroad, referees (e.g. for UCAS), sponsors, university lecturers / academics, international study centre.

Submission of shared email addresses is not best practice. Where there is a genuine reason for the provision of shared contact data, providers will need to request for a switch to be applied.

Validation in the provider portal will identify duplicate contact details.

The email address must contain at least an '@' sign and a dot ('.'). The '@' must not be the first character of the email address and the last dot must be at least one character after the @ sign.

The local-part of the email address (before the @ symbol) may contain only uppercase and lowercase letters (A to Z and a to z), digits 0 to 9 and "special characters" ._%-/'!#$+=?^{|}~;£()+:

The first part of the domain element of the email address (after the @ symbol) may contain only uppercase and lowercase letters (A to Z and a to z), digits 0 to 9 and "Special Characters" ._%-

The final section of the domain element of the email address (e.g. com, org, etc.) may contain only uppercase and lowercase letters (A to Z and a to z)

Email addresses should be reviewed to ensure their accuracy, checking for incorrect spelling especially in the suffix of the address. For example, @gmial @hotmil.

Provider domain email addresses

Where providers have supplied email addresses for graduates on their domain e.g. joe.bloggs@[provider].ac.uk, they should be mindful of the expiry period for these addresses. Some providers allow graduates to keep these addresses for life, others expire them after a fixed period (e.g. six month post-course completion). These email addresses should only be returned as valid graduate contact details for Graduate Outcomes when they are still live accounts on your system. Please refer to your IT department for guidance on the retention policy for such email addresses before submitting them to HESA.

It's important that provider domain email addresses are still live as this has an impact on HESA’s IP address reputation. Should provider domain email addresses be shut down at the start of the survey period, this may lead to our emails bouncing and our IP address being blacklisted.

HESA monitor the delivery of emails and may contact providers if there are low deliverability rates.

View more guidance on the creation of accurate personal contact details.