The Alumni Affairs Office of CUHK launched the Email Forwarding System (EFS) in year 2002. The main purpose of this system is to re-direct (forward) any incoming emails, by using the registered account "@alumni.cuhk.net" on EFS, to a user-defined target email box. This system IS NOT AN EMAIL SYSTEM with account storage, but only acts as a quot;forwarder" of email between one email account and another. The following diagram illustrates the different paths of sending email between EFS and an email system with storage account:

An introduction and benefits of the EFS are documented in this link: http://www.alumni.cuhk.edu.hk/eng/privileges/connection/emaildetail.html

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Unless the EFS server is down, all incoming emails are immediately forwarded to their target email accounts once they are arrived. The most possible reasons that make an email fail to be forwarded via EFS are:

1. The sender is using an email server that is spotted by the EFS server as a spammed server, therefore, all emails come from the spammed server will not be sent out. In such case, the sender may need to contact his/her services provider to clarify the situation.
   
   
2. The receiver's email server has problem, such as the malfunctioning of the email server, receiver's email box quota overflow, or even the unknown receiver email account. All emails sent to the receiver will be queued in the receiver's email server and sometimes this may cause a delay for several hours to several days. Users are advised to contact their email service providers to check for the status of their email servers.

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It is normal for a certain delay in receiving email in almost every email system. The reasons are:

1. he sender's email server has too many emails waiting for dispatch, therefore, it may take a certain period of time to stay in the sending queue. This may also happen to the receiver’s email server when there are a lot of emails pending in the receiving queue.
   
   
2. The receiver's email server has failure and the service provider needs to spend time to swap the malfunctioned server to a normal one. Depending on the complicity of the failure, the time required for swapping a server usually may varied from half a day to several days.As EFS does not store up the incoming emails, and it almost immediately forwards them to the destined email boxes, the delay should be neglected. In most cases, delays are caused by the receiver's email server. It is advised that user should contact the email service provider directly if the delay is serious.

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The EFS server already has antispam function installed. Like other antispam software, it never catches every spam, but will reject an innocent email once in a long while. It checks the IP address of an incoming email, and if it is blacklisted by www.spamcop.net, it will consider it to be a spam and reject it, so it will never be forwarded to the EFS user.

Since there is no antispam software catches every spam, users are advised to use a cocktail remedy, so each antispam component catches some spams missed by others, and increasing the hit rate.

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We are sorry that spam (junk mail) has become a fact of life, and it will stay with us, so let us use remedies that can diminish their annoyance to a tolerable level.

First, you can use your own mail client (e.g. Outlook Express) to filter away mails you consider worthless: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/network/app/email/filter/

Ignore the From: and To: addresses; most often, such information in a spam are totally forged, to mislead those who want to find the spammer. If you want to find out who sent it to you--so you may complain to their ISP--you must see all the Received: headers of the email:http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/19.html and then analyse it with a good spam analyser, e.g. http://www.spamid.net/

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Email address for all users of ...@alumni.cuhk.net are restricted for the use of the Alumni Affairs Office and for alumni related purposes only. The data are kept confidential and would not be released to outside parties. It is not easy to trace from where the junk mail sender has got your email address. There could be many possible ways. For Example,

1. User's email box has been attacked by virus which illegally forwards his/her email address to other parties.
   
   
2. User has sent an email to someone, however, the recipient is attacked by virus which illegally releases the email addresses in the recipient's phone book to other parties.
   
   
3. User has registered to some websites by using his/her email address, and these websites have other usage on its email address captured with or without prior notice to the user.

If you want to filter away mails you consider worthless, pls refer to Q.7

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The nature of virus emails is similar to spam: both are sent deliberately to thousands of recipients, except that the former is sent by a program automatically, whereas the latter is sent by a person, using spam software. Remedies against spam work against viruses too. Important: please be sure you have an antivirus program running in your computer, otherwise it is all too easy to be infected. Do not go online without an antivirus program which updates itself at least once a week.

Unfortunately, many modern viruses use real user name and eaddr as the sender, to gain the trust of recipients, so if one of your email correspondents is infected, your eaddr may be found by the virus, to be used as Sender, in their virus emails sent out to the world. Be assured, if a spam or virus email uses your name as the Sender, it does NOT mean that your computer or account is broken or security is breached.

Since there are thousands and thousands of spam and virus emails going on every hour, it is impossible to hunt down even a small portion effectively. To reduce their annoyance to us, let us filter away the bounced back messages, as explained above. You may also report them to their ISP, and if enough people report, their ISP may take action faster, depending on how much they value their reputation.

(The followings are some websites you may find the latest information of the email virus)
http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/

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1. Do not publish your personal email address on publicly accessible resources.
   
   
2. You may consider maintaining at least two email addresses, i.e. one private address and one public address. The private address is for personal correspondence only. The public address would then be used to register in events, forums, chat rooms, and to subscribe to mailing lists etc.
   
   
3. Your private address should be difficult to spoof. Spammers use combinations of obvious names, words and numbers to build possible addresses. If your private address is simply your first name + your surname (e.g. johnchan), it is very likely that such address could be "created" by the spammers to spam.
   
   
4. If you have to publish your private address electronically, try to mask it to avoid having it harvested by spammers. John.Chan@alumni.cuhk.net is easy to harvest. You may try writing John-dot-Chan-at-alumni-dot-cuhk-dot-net instead.
   
   
5. Chances are high that spammers will harvest your public address fairly quickly. Change to use another one when this address is spammed. Don't be afraid to change it often. Just treat this public address as a temporary one.
   
   
6. Never respond to spam. Most spammers verify receipt and log responses. The more you respond, the more spam you will receive.
   
   
7. Do not click on unsubscribe links from questionable sources. Spammers send fake unsubscribe letters in an attempt to collect active addresses. Once the spammers got confirmation that the address is an active one, it is likely that the owner of the email would receive many more spams.
   
   
8. If your private address is discovered by spammers - change it. This can be inconvenient, but changing your email address does help you avoid spam - at least for a while!
   
   
9. Make sure that your personal computer has installed with an anti-virus programme and with anti-spam features.

(There are plenty of websites which contain useful information about spam and how the spammers collect email address data. The following is one of these websites you may find it useful: http://www.viruslist.com/en/spam/info?chapter=153350528 )

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As you are aware of, the @alumni.cuhk.net address is a forwarding address. User will continue to send out emails vis his/her Internet Service Provider. Some email programmes, however, may allow the user to set the return address on his/her message to something other than the sending address. By setting his/her return address to the @alumni.cuhk.net address, his/her email will appear to come from the .net address.
Different email programmes have different settings on return address. The following is a sample on the steps of changing return address in the "Outlook Express". For more details, the user is advised to consult his/her Internet Service Provider.

Tools➟Account➟Mail

Select the email accourt (if you have more than one account)➟Properties

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