Half of all email sent to a university email address is deemed, with high confidence, to be malicious. The university uses several protective filtering measures to prevent harmful emails from making it to your university email inbox. Without such safeguards, individuals would be more exposed to malicious email messages’ threats.    

Victims of malicious email often lose thousands of dollars in personal funds, access to important files, or have their data exposed. Other attacks damage the university and put personal data, research, and more at risk. It only takes one successful email attack for this to happen. Many of these emails are very well crafted and target vulnerable university populations.   

An email deemed as malicious may end up quarantined due to suspicious origin, attachment types, suspicious or numerous embedded links, the number of recipients, and other factors. There are a small number of false positives, and some legitimate messages may end up being flagged for non-delivery. If you are expecting an email that has not arrived, the best course of action is to check the junk mail folder. 

If you have checked your junk mail folder and still cannot locate your email, submit a Tech Request to Technology Services, where IT staff can look further into systems to try to determine what happened to your message.   

Rarely, a legitimate email may fail to reach its destination, despite our efforts. The following are some suggestions to help you potentially avoid this outcome. 

• Use your university email account (netid@illinois.edu) for all official university business.   
• If you are a faculty or staff member that uses an external sender, please make sure it is using our registered cloud mailer service https://answers.uillinois.edu/85362   
• If you are a faculty member needing to communicate with students consider using an LMS like Canvas to send, store, and organize your communications. Some students may actually prefer this to email.  
• Update your filter settings and safe sender list https://answers.uillinois.edu/49744   

We constantly strive for enough safeguards to protect our population while not creating adverse impacts.  

If you have questions about any of these suggested steps, or need help, reach out to the Technology Services Help Desk at consult@illinois.edu.