Guidelines on Sending Emails to a Large Number of External Users

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WiFi Collaboration among the JUCC Institutions

With the collaboration among the JUCC institutions (CityU, HKU, CUHK, PolyU, HKUST, HKBU, LU and HKIEd), the Computing Services Centre (CSC) is pleased to announce that CityU members (staff members or students alike) from now on can enjoy wifi connections to the Internet while they are visiting any of the above eight JUCC institutions without any prior approval.

All you need is an IEEE802.11b/g/n compliant wireless device, no matter whether it is a WiFi phone, PDA or notebook computer. While you are at one of the JUCC member institutions, use your WiFi device to search the WiFi network there for the SSID "Universities WiFi" (which is common to all JUCC institutions and denotes the name of the collaborated WiFi service). After connecting to the said SSID, use your CityU's Network Connection password to login the wireless network there (the same password for logging in the CityU's Wireless LAN network) and then gain WiFi access to the Internet. You can check the locations at each institution where WiFi access is available by visiting http://wifi.jucc.edu.hk/jucc-wifi/.

The "Universities WiFi" utilizes the most secure connection and data encryption (WPA and WPA2) to protect your data privacy. Please refer to http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/
deptweb/facilities/ctnet/wlan
/wlan-summary.htm for the set-up procedures and details.

Please be reminded that you can also enjoy the same WiFi connection to the Internet while visiting any of the EduRoam member institutions and any local hotspots run by PCCW and Y5Zones. For details, please refer to the CityU WLAN home page at http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/
deptweb/facilities/ctnet/
wlan/wlanmain.htm.

How to Go Green: Double-sided Printing

Double-sided (or 2-sided or duplex) printing should be used whenever possible. Besides the benefits of saving trees, reducing carbon in the atmosphere, and holding a handier set of hardcopies, surprisingly it can save up your print quota. With immediate effect, whenever you use duplex printing to print on a piece of paper through the Quota Controlled Fast Print Queue, your print quota will be deducted by 1.5 instead of 2. This is really a big saver!

To use double-sided printing, when you print:

Choose the printer Quota_FastPQ on CCSTUNG1
Click Preferences and then Finishing on the Printing Preferences window
Select 2-sided Printing and click OK

Using double-sided printing is a small change but can have a big impact. As going green is our common goal, act NOW to show your support!

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Got any questions, comments or suggestions? Contact the editors at ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk

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