Mailman Mailing Lists – Acceptable Use Policies and Guidelines

Email is indeed an easy and direct way to disseminate information to your target audience. Thus the Mailman mailing list service is provided to facilitate faculties, departments and administrative units to disseminate information regarding to teaching, administrative issues and student activities to staff and students through email.

This kind of massive emailing may impose significant loads on the mailing server and even the campus network.

In order to balance between the need and the load, the following policies and guidelines must be observed.

1. Use of Mailman Mailing Lists are bound by the guidelines and policies described in the Handbook – “Computer Network – Policies and Guidelines on Access and Usage“.
2. Only requests from the faculties, departments and administrative units will be considered. An appointed staff member must be designated to take the responsibility as the list administrator (i.e. to handle daily administrative tasks and maintenance of mailing list recipients data).
3. Only information regarding to teaching, administrative issues and student activities should be disseminated.
4. Request to create a list containing email addresses of the whole CUHK community will not be entertained.
5. For a large list (i.e. more than 1000 recipients), number of e-mail sent to the list should be limited to 1 per day.
6. The size limit of each email sent to Mailman lists is 5MB.
7. Sender to Mailman lists should only be CUHK email, i.e. “@cuhk.edu.hk” or “@link.cuhk.edu.hk”.

1. The list administrator must take the responsibility of managing the list. Depending on the type of mailing list created, the list administrator must take up the tasks, such as:
   1. to handle requests of subscription and unsubscription;
   2. to disseminate messages to the list subscribers;
   3. to handle enquiries/complaints from list subscribers.
   4. to obtain and manage, if applicable, subscribers’ data from the affiliated faculties, departments and administrative units, in which the latter serve as data owners of the recipient data they provided.
2. The list administrator has the right to determine who can join the list and to decide who can send message to the list.
3. Subscribers must consent to being on the list. The list administrator should honour requests of unsubscription from the list members immediately.
4. The list administrator should specify the purpose of the mailing list and the unsubscription method.
5. The list administrator has the right to remove a subscriber from the list if the subscriber fails to comply with the stated policies of the list.
6. The list administrator has the right to assign moderators for handling approvals of moderated mailing lists. The list administrator must ensure the delegated moderations are appropriate and in compliance of policies and guidelines set forth here.
7. The list administrator must handle the personal data involved with care, in compliance with ITSC Privacy Policy and Practices in Collecting, Holding and Using of Student and Staff Personal Data (PPS), CUHK Protection of Personal Data (Privacy)  , and Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance. Scope of personal data includes subscribers’ names, email addresses, student/staff IDs, and any other data that might directly or indirectly lead to practicably identification of certain current or former subscribers.
8. The list administrator should review the mailing list(s) regularly and remove them if they are no longer in use.

1. A subscriber has the right to unsubscribe from the list at any time.
2. A subscriber should observe and comply with the rules and regulations set forth in the subscribed list(s).

1. The ITSC Mailman administrator must handle problems, enquiries and complaints from subscribers and list administrators.
2. The ITSC Mailman administrator should provide an online platform accessible to the data owner and the designated list administrator for the purpose of facilitating tasks set forth above.
3. The ITSC Mailman administrator has the right to approve or deny creation of a list
4. The ITSC Mailman administrator has the right to make the final decision on the list name.
5. The ITSC Mailman administrator reserves the right to cease the operation of any list should the list administrator fail to comply with the policies and guidelines set forth here.
6. The ITSC Mailman administrator reserves the right to close any unattended mailing list(s) with no activities detected for over 2 years.