Staff regularly receive an email with a subject line of ‘Spam Notification’ containing a digest of emails which have been quarantined.
An example of this email is shown below:
Staff have the option to select ‘Release to Inbox’ – this will release the individual message to their Outlook Inbox.
There is also an option to ‘Report as Not Junk’. It is crucial to note that ‘Report as Not Junk’ may not mean that future messages from this sender are not trapped by Quarantine. This flags the issue to Microsoft, who assign a ‘spam score’ to the email. This ‘spam score’ is influenced by criteria such as the email content and the volume of emails sent by the sender. The number of individual users who select ‘Report as Not Junk’ can positively affect this ‘spam score’ but this may not necessarily be of sufficient volume to directly influence future email delivery.
If the email sender subsequently attains a ‘spam score’ which allows their emails to be ‘whitelisted’, they will bypass Microsoft’s Quarantine and their emails will be delivered directly to all intended recipient’s mailboxes as normal. Please note that Digital Services has no direct control over this process.
Since it is not good email security practice for Microsoft to publicise the rules which control their ‘spam scoring’, Digital Services will not always be able to establish the reason why specific emails are quarantined since this information is not public knowledge.
How to see your quarantine folder directly in ‘real time’
If staff wish to see their quarantine folder in real time, as they may suspect an expected email may be quarantined ahead of the next scheduled email summary, this can be done via logging into microsoft.
This is authenticated via your University staff email address (e.g. initial.surname@ulster.ac.uk) and the password used also for email and Portal.
Outlook Junk Mail
Digital Services is aware of an issue which may cause some Outlook users within the University to have email messages delivered to their Junk Mail folder rather than their Inbox. This is due to their individual copy of Outlook mistakenly identifying that message as 'spam'.
This is an Outlook Client specific issue, and as such, Digital Services cannot resolve this centrally - so users experiencing this issue will need to resolve this individually, as follows :
- Please check the contents of the Junk Mail folder regularly.
- If an email is in Junk Mail which should not have been marked as 'spam' please RIGHT CLICK on it, and from the pop-up menu select 'Junk Email' and 'Add Sender to Safe Senders List'. Users can also choose to select 'Add Sender's Domain (@example.com) to Safe Senders List' if they are sure they may receive legitimate emails from more than one address on that domain - but this option should be treated with caution.
If further advice or guidance is required, please Contact the Digital Services IT Service Desk.