Legitimate Email Messages Miscategorized as Spam: IT Working to Address Latest Issues and Steps You Can Take Today

Members of the campus community report an increased number of legitimate emails miscategorized as spam and UMass Amherst Information Technology (IT) is addressing the issue with urgency.

An indirect consequence of the pandemic, the overall volume of emails has skyrocketed in the past year while students, faculty, and staff rely more on email for critical, time-sensitive communications.

Spam filtering services are also becoming more sophisticated in response to evolving strategies from known and new spammers. Google and Microsoft, UMass Amherst’s email service providers, maintain multi-tiered, proprietary spam filtering that often adjusts to personal preferences and usage patterns.

In this complex environment, UMass Amherst IT is reviewing a range of technical solutions to optimize email deliverability on campus. Our goal is to reduce information security risks while mitigating the issue of legitimate emails erroneously placed in spam folders.

Weekly updates will be posted on the IT website as technical teams make changes and adjustments in real time. This week, IT teams have implemented technical controls that recognize official university email communications as legitimate. They will continue to expand the scope of these controls to ensure university communications are not erroneously categorized as spam.

While the technical review is underway, members of the campus community can use a new set of instructions to manage email filters and avoid missing messages. UMass Amherst IT recommends that you:

Check your junk email folder regularly.
Mark important or miscategorized emails as not junk. This alerts spam filtering algorithms and ensures that similar messages and senders will be sorted correctly.
Add the junk email folder to your favorites to more easily see new messages that have been categorized as junk.

Contact IT user services at it@umass.edu or 413-545-TECH (8324) with questions.