Email Threat Protection

How It Works

Email traversing our infrastructure passes through several layers of protection:

• The University’s Mail Filtering Service

• Microsoft Exchange Online Protection/Defender for Office 365

  • 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

  • Safe Links - 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 may be 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 in your email program. 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

Safe Links

Safe Links is a Microsoft 365 technology that reviews links (URLs) in email messages, Teams chats, and files to help protect you from malware and phishing attempts. If a URL is identified as suspicious or malicious, you might be blocked from opening the URL when you click it in an email or Office document. Instead of going directly to the site, you might see a warning page instead:

For more information on Safe Links, including additional examples of warnings, please visit: Complete Safe Links overview for Microsoft Defender for Office 365 - Microsoft Defender for Office 365 | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft 365 Privacy and Security

Please visit the Microsoft Trust Center for more information on Microsoft’s privacy and security commitments.