Email Address with a Personal Touch

Horizontal Rule [Dec 97]

Mei Ling Lee

We are now living in the "Information" age and electronic mail (email) has gradually become one of the indispensable office automation tools, which enables us to communicate much more efficiently. Before you can exchange information electronically, first of all you'll need a personal email address and its function is somewhat similar to the traditional postal address. If you are a staff at CityU who owns a personal email account, your email address will be

<emailaccount name>@cityu.edu.hk

For example, Allen Tam is a staff in the Electronic Engineering Department (EE) who has a personal email account, eeallen. His email address will be eeallen@cityu.edu.hk. With it, he can then receive email from his friends.

As time passes by, our friend, Allen, has got promoted to another department, say Computer Science Department (CS) and his email account will have to be changed to csallen. Consequently, csallen@cityu.edu.hk will be his email address instead. Although the CSC do provide a grace period for such changes, in the long run, it is of Allen's best interest to inform all his email correspondents about the change of his email address. Other cases like change of department name and splitting of departments also involve the change of email account names. In view of this as well as further improving our services, the CSC has introduced the concept of Personal Email Alias.

Personal Email Alias

Personal Email Alias is simply an additional name, which is more descriptive, for your email account. The alias name is no longer limited to eight characters. As a matter of fact, you can choose up to 20 characters for your alias name. As a result, one can choose an alias name which reflects your own personal name. For instance, Allen has chosen allen.tam to be his email alias name and now he has two personal email addresses. He can choose either csallen@cityu.edu.hk or allen.tam@cityu.edu.hk (alias). Obviously, the latter would be much easier for his email correspondents to remember. In addition, this provides the flexibility should he change department in the future as the alias name can be retained. Sounds great, isn't it?

Before you start thinking about your alias name, there are a few rules to follow. The alias name can be as long as 20 characters including a dot ( . ) and is not case-sensitive. There must be at least one dot in the alias name, but it can neither appear at the beginning nor the end of an alias name. Consecutive dots are not allowed, too. Valid characters include: alphabets ( a-z ), numbers ( 0-9 ), hyphen ( - ), underscore ( _ ) and dot ( . ).

Hurry! Come and register your personal email alias now by visiting the Administrative Services Web page that falls under our CityU Intranet.

[Issue No. 13]


[u logo]
Computing Services Centre
City University of Hong Kong
ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk

[Home Page][CSC Home][NetComp Home][Content Home][Previous Page][Next Page]