Email Filtering Service

All University email accounts are protected by additional email filtering, offering a greater level of protection against potentially offensive or malicious content.

Our email filtering service is designed to reduce the amount of spam, phishing, ransomware and other fraudulent email received by staff and students, improving the overall security of our network.

Overview

The filtering service scans both incoming and outgoing email. Incoming emails are assigned to one of three categories:

  • If the email is identified as safe, it will arrive in the email inbox as normal.
  • If the email is identified as being malicious or spam, it will be blocked and it will not arrive in the email inbox.
  • If the system isn’t sure, it will place the email in quarantine.

How the service works

  • URL defense: Links in emails sent from outside the University might look a little different. The system amends links to redirect via its “URL defense” service. URL defense verifies links are legitimate and safe. When you hover over a link it will have ‘https://urldefense.com/v3/’ at the beginning of it. This routes the link via the filtering service for an extra check. If at some point in the future, a link is identified as malicious, you will not be directed to the website.
  • An additional level of security has also been put in place for colleagues and students who have received a high number of malicious emails previously. These people will be unaware that they have been added to this service, however, they may notice a difference when clicking on a link in an email from an external contact. The link may initially open in the ‘Proofpoint URL Isolation’ “browser-within-a-browser” which allows the user to safely view a high-risk web page while a deeper threat scan and analysis is being performed.
  • Held emails: Suspicious emails may be ‘held’ by our filtering service and not be delivered to your inbox – they are essentially quarantined. You will receive a twice daily digest email that summarises these held emails so that you can review and release on a self-serve basis where you believe them to be legitimate.
  • Email warning tags: You may also see ‘email warning tags’ on emails from untrusted sources. This warning will appear at the top of the email.

Digest emails explained

If you have held emails then you will receive a digest email. Your digest email will contain a list of emails being held for you to review.

The digest emails are sent to you twice a day, however if no emails have been quarantined in the past 12 hours you will not receive a digest email.

Further information

More information about the email filtering service including what the digest emails look like and the email address that they come from can be found in our knowledge base article: