How It Works

The University's Office 365 instance employs a suite of technologies to protect recipients from email-related threats:

• UT Austin Mail Filtering Service
• Exchange Online Protection
  
  • Connection filtering - Dynamically identifies safe and unsafe sources of email (i.e. email servers).
  • Anti-spam protection - Scans email to identify characteristics matching spam messages.
  • Anti-phishing protection - Scans email to identify characteristics matching phishing messages.
  • Spoof intelligence - Identifies 3rd-party email messages that purport to be from someone else (e.g. impersonating a University email address).
  • Anti-malware protection - Identifies viruses and other malware threats present in email messages.
  • URL threat protection - Scans links present in email messages to protect against links to malicious websites.

If an incoming email passes the above checks, it is delivered normally (i.e. to the recipient's Inbox). Messages failing one or more of these checks is handled in one or more of the following ways:

• Delivery to the Junk Email folder.
• Delivery with a warning to the recipient (e.g. [UTEXAS: SUSPECTED SPAM]).
• Quarantined for manual analysis.
• Deleted and not delivered.

How to Get Help

While these technologies have a low rate of false positives, they can and do occur. If you were sent an email message that you believe was misclassified, please do the following:

• If the message was delivered to your Junk Email folder:
  
  • First, try marking the message as Not Junk.
  • If the issue persists, please contact the UT Service Desk, including a full copy of the message's headers in the ticket.
• If the message was delivered with a warning (e.g. [UTEXAS: SUSPECTED SPAM]):
  
  • Please contact the UT Service Desk, including a full copy of the message's headers in the ticket.
• If you suspect that the message was quarantined or otherwise not delivered:
  
  • Please contact the UT Service Desk with the following information:
    
    • Email address or domain of the sender.
    • Email address of the recipient.
    • If known, the subject line of the message.
    • The approximate date/time the message was sent.