The university uses a variety of tools to reduce the amount of spam, phishing, and other malicious email that reaches your U-M email inbox. No single tool can stop all malicious email, so we take a layered approach to email security.
Filters at the U-M Mail Gateway
Email sent to your @umich.edu address goes through the U-M Mail Gateway, where multiple filters and tools block known spam, phishing, and other malicious emails. These include:
- ClamAV. An open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats.
- Rspamd. An open source spam filtering system.
- Area1. A cloud-based service that identifies malicious email. For Gmail at U-M users, emails identified by Area1 are moved to your Spam folder.
- Do Not Spam List (vendor block IP lists). These dynamic block lists are used to stop spam and phishing emails from IP addresses known to be malicious.
- Michigan Intelligence for Threat Negation (MITN). A customized threat intelligence repository developed at U-M that is used to identify and block known threats, particularly those targeting universities.
Gmail at U-M Email Protection
Gmail automatically identifies spam and other suspicious emails and sends them to Spam. You can see the Spam label in the list of labels on the left side of your inbox; it is a hexagon with an exclamation mark in it. We recommend that you check your Spam label at least once a week to mark any misidentified emails. See Google's instructions: Mark or unmark Spam in Gmail.
Retracting Delivered Malicious Email
In rare cases, we may retract already-delivered email messages when they present an active security threat, per SPG 601.25: Information Security Incident Reporting. Examples of such messages include phishing emails that have been successful or are likely to be successful, emails sent by compromised U-M accounts or services, emails credibly impersonating U-M individuals, departments, or organizations, emails attempting to deliver malware, etc.
All IT staff adhere to SPG 601.11: Privacy and the Need to Monitor and Access Records, SPG 601.07: Responsible Use of Information Resources, and all relevant IT policies when accessing and handling U-M data, including email. For more information, see Information Assurance Operational Transparency.
Michigan Medicine Email Protection
Michigan Medicine provides spam and malicious email filtering for its Outlook/Exchange email service.
Note that email sent to Michigan Medicine email users at their @umich.edu addres goes through the U-M Mail Gateway and benefits from the additional email protections applied there. Mail sent directly to @med.umich.edu addresses does not go through the U-M Mail Gateway.