ISG Blog

Microsoft can analyze dangerous emails to determine why those messages made it past your spam filters.

When you receive an email that you find suspicious - potentially a phishing email - so you ignore or delete it.  Another option is to report the email to Microsoft for analysis using a free Microsoft add-in for Outlook called Report Message.  You can also use it to report a "false positive," meaning a legitimate email that was incorrectly identified as spam. Microsoft analyzes such messages to improve its spam filtering technology.

The add-in works with desktop and web clients, though the install is different.

If you use both clients, installing in one will make it available in the other however:

Installing for desktop

From your Inbox, select the Home tab then click on the Get Add-ins button

This opens the Add-ins window. In the search box type ‘report message’ as in the screenshot.

Select the Report Message add-in and install it.

For web client

From your inbox , select a message and from the right hand side of the message window click on the three dots

Scroll down to the bottom of the menu that appears and select ‘Get Add-ins’

Install is the same as for desktop client.

Using Report Message

Desktop – Select the message , then click on the ‘Report Message’. From the menu select an appropriate option. 

Web – Select the message , then click on the three dots in the message window and select ‘Report Message’ from the menu. Select an appropriate option.

There have probably been times you are waiting for an important and urgent email that does not come and ponder, has it been sent or has it been blocked? The Salvation Army like all reputable organisations protect staff by blocking emails that are malicious, offensive or simply annoying. The problem is that on rare occasions emails are incorrectly marked as spam!

Now there are two ways you can check for valid emails trapped in the spam filter!

Message Center:

Message Center is available at the following address https://email-quarantine.google.com/messagecenter.  Here you can view spam and if an email is genuine, click the Not spam (deliver) button to go to sent to your inbox.  You can also view all email in the last 30 days and even mark email that was sent through as spam.

Weekly Email Digest:

Starting this Friday, you will receive an email listing all emails received in the last period, with those marked as spam listed first. You can select the options to do the same as the Message center and send valid mail or mark it as spam.

Note:

• ISG can track email but can no longer release email, you will need to complete this yourself via the Message Center.
• You cannot view spam email for a shared mailbox, a ticket will still need to be logged to ISG to track undelivered email.
• This does not effect Tonga Region, please continue to check your spam folder.

From time to time we all get unexpected emails. Maybe it is from a family member asking for a favour, but those aren't the ones I'm referring to. The emails I talking about are ones that invite action. They want you to click somewhere, or reply with certain information (yes I know emails from Team iSG do this at times).

The difference is what you're expecting! You should expect an email from Team iSG with information about a request. And you should expect to be asked to follow a link to update information in that email.

What if you get an email that looks like this?

My initial reaction to is simply delete this and NOT follow any of the links. Why? I wasn't expecting any files to be sent to me. So that sets off warning bells in my head (plus it means 1 less email to have to deal with).

Of course a little further down in my inbox there was an email from a friend telling me they were sending me some photos through a service called TrasferBigFiles.com. That gave me the opportunity to question them and verify that I was actually going to be getting files and not some malware or a virus on my computer.

Over the weekend we changed the delivery of email from the IHQ Barracuda to routing through a Google service. This means that we now have a lot more autonomy over both catching and releasing spam for people within the territory.

Google recently published that in Gmail it catches 99/9% of spam (see the article here). However the point of the change was to enable us to better diagnose delivery issues and release emails that are falsely classed as spam. The process through IHQ was laborious and time consuming while also being constrained by the 12 hour time difference and a limit on spam being held for only 48 hours.

From today we'll be working with a new process for releasing and incorrectly captured spam. Please be patient with us as we iron out the kinks in the process. The key details we require when looking for messages are sender, recipient, date, and time.  

May your week be empty of spam and filled with progress towards making our communities better places for everyone within them.