Bulk Email Policy (Drafted)

Bulk email service* provides an easy and direct way to disseminate information to university members. However, a misuse, abuse or phishing attack on compromised email addresses to send out spam on mass mail services causing University members to receive unwanted or unrequested emails.

A University-wide policy is therefore drafted to keep a balance between facilitating University communication through bulk email services and minimizing the impact due to a misuse of the service. And further helps to streamline the creation and management of IT recourses in mass mail.

In Summary,

For email that sending to more than 30 recipients, it must not display the list of recipients in the email. It needs to be dispatched through
- Mailing list (running by either ITSC or department)
- Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)
- Mail Merge
For Mailing List Service,
- Mailing List of over 50 members can only be created for announcement purpose. Besides, only a designated person(s) can post to the list.
- All mails sending to a mailing list over 500 members must be moderated. That is, messages will first be sent to moderator(s) for approval before distributing to all members of the list.
- ITSC or Departments would close any unattended mailing list(s) with no activities detected for over 2 years though renewed.
For Office 365 Mail Group,
- A standard email group format is proposed
- All created groups must be centrally managed by ITSC or department delegated administrator.
For Mass Mail,
- Follow the use guideline as endorsed by IT Governance Committee

The above operations have been consulted through different user groups including

Please share your views and suggestions to this policy through ITSC Service Desk by 2 Jan 2020. If no major comment is received, the proposal will be submitted to IT Governance Committee for endorsement.

* Bulk email service include (1) Mailing List Service (2) Office 365 Mail Group (3) Mass Mail Service