The University's email system works very hard to keep Spam (unwanted or malicious) messages from reaching your inbox. Spam is often obvious and easy to catch; but can sometimes be crafted to specifically target university employees and students by being disguised as messages from either OIT other University departments.
If you are unsure whether or not an email is legitimate, forward the email to abuse@unr.edu and contact the
OIT Support Center for assistance.
What is OIT Doing to Protect Me from Spam?
Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection
To provide advanced levels of security and reliability, our email servers use Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection to provide real-time protection against malware attacks and malicious links. Additionally, advanced tools are available for quicker responses to threats, easier management of messages marked as spam, and ultimately a cleaner, more reliable, inbox. Any email marked as "spam" will be redirected away from your inbox, into your Junk Email folder.
While Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection is very good at it's job, there is a chance that Spam messages may still find their way into your inbox.
What Can I Do to Protect Myself Against Spam Messages?
How to Mark Messages as Junk Mail in Outlook 2016 - 2019
Right clicking on email in your inbox will bring up a menu with a number of options. When you hover your mouse over Junk, you will see the following list of options:
- Block Sender: This option will block all messages received from a specific email address and will redirect any messages from that address into the Junk folder.
- Never Block Sender: This option will "whitelist" emails from that email address, meaning that no emails sent from that specific email address will be sent to your spam folder.
- Never Block Sender's Domain: This will whitelist any emails received from a specific email domain (i.e. @unr.edu, @gmail.com, etc.) Any emails sent from that domain will be added to your inbox instead of going to the Junk folder.
- Not Junk: This option is only available when you right click emails that are already in your Junk folder. This will allow individual emails to be placed into your inbox without affecting any other Spam protection rules you have in place.
- Junk Email Options: This allows you to change the severity of the spam Identification process.
Junk Email Options
By Default, your Outlook client will the set the Junk Email filtering levels to "low". However, if you find that you are receiving too much Spam into your inbox, you can use this screen to increase the sensitivity.
Note: The higher the setting, the more likely you are to experience a false-positive: meaning that a legitimate email ending up in your Junk Mail folder is more likely.
The other tabs in this window further help to control the spam filtering.
- Safe Senders: Any email address added to the safe senders list will ensure that those emails always go to your inbox. Please be aware of emails that appear legitimate, but may actually be malicious.
- Safe Recipients: You can add a specific email address, or an entire domain (i.e. @unr.edu, @gmail.com, etc.) to this list. These addresses are marked as safe regardless of what they contain.
- Block Senders: This allows you to block an email address or entire domain. Any addresses added to this list will automatically go into your junk mail folder.
