Guidelines on Sending Emails to a Large Number of External Users

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A3 Printing Support Available

The Fast Printing Service has been well-received since its launch on 31 January 2007 (please see "Guideline for Fast Network Printing Service" for details.) In view of the need for A3 Black & White and A3 Colour printouts, we are glad to announce that the Fast Printing Service also supports them with immediate effect. Users may simply set the document size to A3 for A3 printouts, and to simplify the calculation, we will maintain both A4 and A3 printing at the same rates for the moment. The charging rates for the Fast Printing Service may be adjusted in future reviews to reflect the updated operation costs if necessary.

Relocation of Express Printing Service and Fast Printing Service

In order to improve the working environment at the CSC Student Terminal Area, the Express Printing Service located along the main corridor of the CSC has been moved to the new Printing and Plotting Room situated between Teaching Studios B and D, while the Fast Printing Service has been relocated to the area outside Teaching Studio G.

Illegal Storing or Sharing Activities of Copyrighted Materials – Your Personal Liability

The entire CityU community is reminded of the University's commitment to the protection of intellectual property and copyrighted material. When it comes to illegal storing or sharing of digital materials - whether music, video, text, or picture - the University imposes its own penalties (disciplinary action, loss of network connectivity) on anyone who is found to be using CityU facilities or campus network for such purposes.

Moreover, organisations hired by the copyright owners are aggressively searching for copyright violators on the Internet and will take independent legal action against such violators. Peer-to-peer file sharing activity using the campus network is easily subject to their scrutiny as long as they remain as one of the participants. Many past legal actions by these organisations have resulted in successful imposition of substantial monetary penalties on the violators.

Please be aware that the target of these actions is not only the individuals engaged in the violations but also the University if it has not shown its diligence in curbing these violations being carried out on its computers or network. As an Internet service provider, the University has no way to prevent but to be obliged without delay to cooperate fully with any law enforcement agency requesting the names of individuals who use computers to share copyrighted materials illegally.

As such, users who use their accounts on the University facilities for such activity inevitably expose both themselves and potentially the University to legal action. Therefore, to protect yourself and the University, make sure you will not engage in illegal storing or sharing of copyrighted materials.

Please Tell Us If You No Longer Need a Booked CSC Teaching Studio

The teaching studios in the Computing Services Centre (CSC) have always been under great demands. For better uses of University resources and for benefits of those staff and students who may still wait for these rooms, as soon as you know that you no longer need the booked CSC teaching studio, please kindly cancel your booking through the CSC Teaching Studio Booking System or through our staff at the Service Counter in the CSC Terminal Areas at least one day in advance. If you have any enquiries, please contact the CSC Service Counter.

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Issue 49 - September 2006

Guidelines on Sending Emails to a Large Number of External Users
By Raymond Poon

At times, most departments may have genuine needs of sending email to a large number of external recipients, and yet quite a number of such email was either bounced as undelivered email or returned with undeliverable notifications by the recipients' email servers due to the following reasons:

Departments' email recipient lists were outdated (e.g. the recipients' email addresses are invalid)
The size of the email attachment was too large, resulting in the email being rejected by the email servers at the recipients' end.

Sometimes the number of such bounced email or undeliverable email notifications was so huge (as the email is often delivered at the same time) that it jammed our email servers, causing prolonged sluggish email delivery. Worse still, complaints were received to ask the CityU to stop sending the email for reasons such as the recipients considered it as spam mail, or the email attachment caused the recipients' email disk quota severely depleted, resulting in their subsequent incoming email being missed.

As such, departments have to exercise care when sending email to a great number of external recipients. Moreover, it can also devastatingly damage the image and the operation of the University if this kind of email is sent without prior consent of the recipients. For example, if some recipients do make complaints to those Real Time Spam Black Lists (RBL) sites and have the university email server being successfully blacklisted, no CityU users will be able to send email to all those organizations that are using the RBL as a means to fight spam mail. Besides, it is also undesirable to send unsolicited email with an attachment as the recipients may not know who you are and whether your attachment is safe to open. If however you do have to send an unsolicited email with an attachment, please limit the size of the attachment to a minimum as the acceptable size limit of an email message for many email systems is well below 5MB.

In order to safeguard the reputation of the University, it is advisable to adopt the following guidelines for good practice:

No matter how small the number of recipients is, avoid sending commercial advertising material without their prior consent.
Avoid sending email to a large number of recipients without their prior consent and always keep an updated mailing list. Make a plan beforehand to obtain their prior consent and collect their email addresses, say, during an activity or while they visit our campus or your departmental website.
If sending unsolicited email is unavoidable, and in doing so without subjecting the University to any possible legal liability or ill-publicity, include a means in the email either to invite the recipient to join your mailing list or allow recipients to remove their email addresses from your mailing list (e.g. through clicking an URL). These removal requests should be dealt with in a timely manner. In general, an opt-in approach is preferred to an opt-out.
Avoid attaching any file in mass mailings especially with the unsolicited email (e.g. putting the file on the web site for downloading can be an alternative).
If direct attachment is unavoidable, keep it small by selecting the most appropriate way (e.g. for image file, keep the resolution to a reasonable level) and format (e.g. produce an electronic document in pdf format instead of image format) to generate the attachment file. Do not attach any file that has embedded scripts, macros or requires any software (including those plug-ins for browser) to execute as it may impose unnecessary security risks to the recipients and will likely be removed by the email server at the recipients' end.

Please watch out for the following upcoming laws related to the spam email and make timely changes to the respective business operations:

Anti-spam (Proposal)

Anti-spam bill set for LegCo

http://www.news.gov.hk/en/category/
businessandfinance/060706/print/060706en03006.htm

Legislative Council Brief Unsolicited Electronic Message Bill

http://www.citb.gov.hk/ctb/eng/legco/pdf/
LegCo_message.pdf