Millions of messages with criminal or junk intent are prevented from reaching the inboxes of our faculty, staff, students and alumni, every day !
Temple's email infrastructure works 24/7 to protect our users and Temple's systems from malicious and nuisance attempts to disrupt business, steal identities via phishing schemes and other social engineering means, embed ransomware and other malware, and wreak general havoc. Among our toolkit to provide protection, Microsoft employs the latest security technology using threat data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Microsoft's threat analysis determines when:
- to deliver a piece of mail to your inbox
- direct a message to your junk folder
- completely prevent delivery to our system based on credible threat intelligence
Internet Domains with Poor Reputational Ratings
What triggers Microsoft to prevent delivery of an email? When an entity (domain) sends an excessive amount of spam or other illegitimate messages, Microsoft and associated security sources will assign it a poor reputational rating and prevent the delivery of messages from that entity. The email from that location is rated as too unsafe for delivery.
Only when the entity corrects the issue and their reputational rating improves, will emails from them start to be delivered again. An example of a domain that has exhibited a poor reputational rating is Weebly, from which Microsoft’s automation detected an excessive amount of illicit mail traffic for several months.
The majority of top research higher ed institutions are now using the Microsoft platform for their email management. Please note that when Microsoft prevents delivery from a specific domain, no organization using Microsoft Outlook 365 will receive email from that domain. This preventive action is not specific to Temple University, so when mail is blocked at Temple, it is blocked at all the Microsoft-managed locations. Similar artificial intelligence is used by Google, Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, AOL or any other reputable email provider.
How do I manage my email with this type of automation?
Email that is deemed risky, but not blocked, will be sent to your junk mail folder and retained for 30 days. You should check this folder periodically, especially when you are specifically expecting email from a non-Temple colleague or external vendor and have not received it in your inbox. Be careful, however, to make sure any links or attachments in the message are expected before clicking on them .
You won't know if email has been outright blocked. If you haven’t received email from a specific location in a while - and you have not set any filtering, either intentionally or accidentally - then it is possible that the sender has developed a poor reputational score. ITS advises that you do not include an external Temple link in a signature file as a matter of practice. Your email messages could be blocked if that external site develops a poor reputational score.
Please note: Although there are Microsoft support websites that reference Outlook 365 quarantine fuctionality, these features are not used in Temple's Microsoft environment.
What local Temple resources are available so I can avoid external website hosting?
There are some Temple-hosted resources available that can help you avoid security issues that can occur with external site hosting.
Temple offers individual, departmental or research center website hosting capability at sites.temple.edu . For more information, visit the sites.temple.edu help site .