Email: Managing spam and phishing messages
By May 1st, 2025, all OCU email accounts will no longer be using Barracuda for email filtering and, instead, will be filtered by Microsoft 365 email security policies to handle spam and phishing messages. This article provides instructions for managing spam and phishing messages within Microsoft 365.
Overview
If you have an email account, you almost certainly have experienced receiving unsolicited and often irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent to your mailbox. These "spam" messages are often sent to large number of recipients and can include advertisements, phishing attempts, or malicious content designed to deceive or harm the recipient. Spam emails can clutter your inbox, pose security risks, and waste your time. Effective email filtering helps manage and reduce the impact of spam.
Campus Technology Services (CTS) employs Microsoft 365 email policies to help filter incoming spam and phishing messages to minimize the impact on email accounts and mitigate risks. You as an email user can further assist in the defense of these unwanted messages by taking action when you receive spam. This rest of this article explains how you can manage spam messages you receive through your OCU email account.
Quarantine
OCU's email security policies scans email messages as they are received by the university and evaluates their likelihood of being spam or phishing messages.
For security reasons and to mitigate harm to the university, messages with a likelihood of being phishing are immediately routed by these policies to a quarantine that only email administrators can monitor. Administrators frequently view this quarantine and will take further action on these messages as needed.
Messages that are evaluated as having a high likelihood of being spam are automatically moved to the recipient's email quarantine. This quarantine is separate from the user's mailbox they view through Outlook as to minimize the clutter of these likely spam messages. The quarantine will hold messages for 30 days before they are permanently removed.
Once per day, users who have received new spam in their quarantine will receive an email message with a list of the new spam received in their quarantine. The message comes from quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com with the subject line Microsoft 365 security: You have messages in quarantine. In the body of the message will be listed the new spam messages and options to review the message, release message to your inbox, or block the sender from sending you messages in the future. Here is an example of this message:
Optionally, a user may access their quarantine at any time by browsing to https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine. From here, you can see the messages still being held within your quarantine and take action on messages if needed. Here is an example of a quarantine:
Junk Email folder
Email messages evaluated as being possible spam messages but with a less likelihood as those that sent to the quarantine will be delivered to the Junk Email folder within a user's mailbox. Unlike the quarantined messages, no notification is provided the user that a message has been redirected to their junk folder. It is the user's responsibility to occasionally evaluate the messages in their junk folder and take action as needed.
For example, if you were to find a message in Junk Email that should not be junk, you can select that message and use the Move to Inbox action. At that point, you will be given the option to never send future messages by that sender to the Junk folder, if that is the desired future action for that sender. Here is an example of the prompt you would see:
Reporting and filtering spam and phishing messages
Though the email filtering policies employed by Microsoft do a really good job of filtering must unwanted messages, it is not foolproof. If you receive a message in your Inbox that you have determined to be spam or phishing, you can report these messages to Microsoft easily so that they can be properly handled going forward. Simply select the message in your Inbox, click the Report button, and choose whether to Report phishing or Report junk. This will remove the message from your Inbox and help "train" the Microsoft email filtering intelligence to improve evaluations of similar emails in the future.
And as always, if you receive an email you think may be a phishing message but are uncertain, you can forward it to the CTS IsItLegit@okcu.edu mailbox and have a CTS email administrator check it out for you.