Our email service provider recently moved email delivery to a newer, more modern system. One of the features of the new system is stronger security and protection from spam. An unfortunate side-effect is that some emails delivered from ANR applications are being marked as spam which moves them to your junk folder. We have reached out to our service provider and have these emails white-listed to fix this problem. This change should be implemented shortly. In the meantime, CSIT recommends ANR employees check their junk email folders for messages from Collaborative Tools, ANR Report and other legitimate mailing list items.

To recover those legitimate messages falsely deemed to be junk, and to train Outlook's filtering going forward, you need to reclassify manually those emails as “Not Junk.”

To do so:

1-    click on Junk Email folder

2-    right-click on the legitimate email

3-    select Junk > Not Junk

4-    Before clicking OK on the prompt “This message will be moved back into the inbox Folder”, check the email address and make sure it is a legitimate one you recognize.

1. Check the box “Always trust e-mail from xx@xx.edu” to register that sender and avoid these emails going to the Junk folder in the future.
2. Do this for common ANR email senders, including for example “anrupdate@ucanr.edu,” “help@ucanr.edu,” and “no-reply@ucanr.edu.”

A bit more on spam.

Spam, or junk email, is an unavoidable aspect of life online. Unsolicited email, often disguising links that could expose your computer to malicious programs, flood into all our email addresses constantly. Behind the scenes, our network providers do as much as they can to eliminate spam before it can even reach our email applications, there is no way to stop all of it. Instead, our email programs try to filter suspicious email messages into a Junk Email or Spam folder. With Microsoft Outlook, the Junk Email Filter is turned on by default and provides a base level of protection from a large amount of obvious spam.

However, the system is not perfect. Perfectly legitimate messages can contain subtle characteristics similar enough to known spam that they trigger filtering incorrectly.

Outlook contains a large number of anti-spam tools that can be personalized for your specific Junk Email folder. Regardless of how finely you set your own spam filter, you will need to continue to check your Junk Email folder regularly for false positives. No one wants to miss out on a crucial announcement or time-sensitive inquiry that could be hiding away, unread, in an unexamined Junk Email folder.