Changes to MIT's Email Service

March 20, 2019

Mark V. Silis, Vice President for Information Systems and Technology |

Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) is making changes to MIT’s email infrastructure to improve community members’ experience with two features of MIT’s email services: automatic forwarding and spam filtering.

Email Forwarding

On Tuesday, March 19, IS&T changed MIT’s email routing configuration to address issues reported by community members who forward their MIT email to another service. IS&T determined that MIT’s on-premises Exchange infrastructure sometimes interfered with delivery of automatically forwarded email; forwarded messages now bypass this component.

Spam Filtering

IS&T, in response to reports from community members and following discussions with Microsoft, has determined that the protection.office.com web interface is not meeting community needs for managing spam filtering.

On the evening of Thursday, March 21, IS&T will change MIT’s email configuration so that messages marked as spam by Exchange Online Protection will no longer be held in quarantine. You may receive one more email quarantine summary on Friday, 3/22, and then these daily messages will cease.

For those who store and access their email through MIT’s Exchange email service, messages marked as spam will be delivered to the Junk folder in the recipient’s mailbox.
For those who forward their MIT email to another service, messages marked as spam will be delivered to the forwarding address, where they will be handled according to the receiving system’s rules.

No action is required on your part. To learn more about this change, visit the Knowledge Base.

Once the new spam filtering configuration is in place:

Messages in your Junk folder will be permanently deleted after 30 days. This includes messages you place there yourself.
If you maintain “safe” and “blocked” senders lists, you may continue to do so using Outlook Web Access (owa.mit.edu) or the Outlook desktop program.

If you have questions about these changes or experience any issues, please contact the IS&T Service Desk.

Sincerely,
Mark V. Silis
Vice President for Information Systems and Technology

This message has also been posted to the IS&T website.

http://ist.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/news/email-service-update