General Email Services: Frequently Asked Questions

How to protect my email address?

The following are some tips on protecting your email address from being collected by spammers:

NEVER buy or enquire any products or services advertised in spam. Do not reply to any spam mail.

2. Avoid disclosing your official email address unless you know how it will be used

Be careful when you need to fill in your email address in any paper or online copy forms.

3. Avoid posting your official email address in searchable format online

Because spammers use specialized searching tools (Spambots) to scan web-pages, newsgroups, discussion forums ... etc. for email addresses, you should avoid posting your official email address online. If it is necessary  to display your email address, you should try to disguise it. The following are some examples:

• Display it as an image:
   

  My email address:

  
   

• Display the "@" character as an image:
   

  My email address:   tom.chancityu.edu.hk

• Separate the email domain (e.g. "@cityu.edu.hk") of your email address
   

  Staff Name	Email Address
  Tom Chan	tom.chan
  Tai-Man Chan	tmchan
  ...	...
  (Please append "@cityu.edu.hk" at the end of the email address)

Note: You should also avoid using the "mailto:" hyperlinks for your email address, because they will be easily collected by spammers.

References: How do spammers get my email address?

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Maintained and supported by Computing Services Centre
E-mail: cc@cityu.edu.hk
Last modified:  Friday, 27-Jan-06 09:39:22