Using Message Reporting and Safe Senders List to ensure legitimate mail is not marked as SPAM
Our recent migration of MX records for the @utoronto.ca and @mail.utoronto.ca domains changed the way that anti-spam works for individuals with addresses in those domains. Incoming mail is now scanned by Exchange Online Protection (EOP).
There have been sporadic reports of EOP generating spam false positives (legitimate messages marked as spam and delivered to the “Junk Email” folder instead of “Inbox” folder). The service will improve its accuracy over time as it learns about our communication patterns but you can take the following steps to help:
Message Reporting
Use the message reporting function in Outlook or OWA to correct the categorization of a message.
- With the message highlighted, select “Report Message” from the menubar.
- Select the desired message category.
- Re-classifying a message as “Not Junk” will move it to your Inbox folder and will also allow you to provide feedback to EOP.
Reports like the above will contribute to the ruleset used but if you want to guarantee that future messages from the same sender are received in your inbox, you can add them to your “Safe Sender List”.
Add the sender to your “Safe Senders list”
- In Outlook, right-click on the miscategorized message and then select: Junk > Never Block Sender
- In Outlook Web Access (OWA – https://mail.utoronto.ca), select the gear icon from the top right side of the menubar.
- Select Mail > Accounts > Block or Allow and add the email address to the “Safe Senders and Recipients” section.
You can add up to 1,024 addresses or domains to your safe sender list.
As always, you are encouraged to check your “Junk Email” folder regularly for legitimate email messages. Given the recent change in anti-spam infrastructure, this is even more important.
To give people the time to become accustomed to this new process and populate their safe sender lists, we’re temporarily extending the deletion period on junk email folders from 30 days to 90 days.