Mayor Vince Gray today signed a mayoral order strongly discouraging city employees from using private email accounts to conduct official city business.

The order comes in the wake of revelations that D.C. CFO Natwar Gandhi and other senior D.C. officials regularly used private email accounts for official business, shielding elements of their work from public scrutiny through Freedom of Information requests.

“It is the policy of the District of Columbia that District employees are strongly discouraged from using private email accounts to transact public business and should do so only in rare instances where access to their District provided email account is, for practical reasons, not available,” states the order, which will be published in the D.C. Register this Friday.

The order additionally states that if private emails are to be used, D.C. employees should send copies of their correspondence to their official D.C. email accounts.

Beyond Gandhi, Mayor Vince Gray was said to have used a private email account in limited circumstances, and former Mayor Adrian Fenty similarly did so. A number of D.C. councilmembers have used private email accounts for official purposes, though Gray’s order doesn’t apply to the council or its staff.

The use of private email accounts certainly hasn’t been limited to D.C. government officials, though—in a famous 2007 case, presidential advisor Karl Rove was found to have sent emails on official matters through non-government domains.

2012-102 Use of Private Email to Transact Public Business