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Spam, Virus Protection and Phishing Avoidance

The Security Matters website provides information about the latest viruses and other threats that can affect computer systems as well as other general advice on computer security.

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:

Reporting a suspected phishing email

If you receive an email messsage that you suspect is a phishing attempt, you can report it the Help Desk, in case the University is being targeted by a phishing attack. Remember, the University of Toronto will never ask for your password via email. If you receive a suspicious email containing a link requesting your UTORid and password, forward the message to report.phishing@utoronto.ca.

For more details about phishing emails, see our article about avoiding email fraud.