Email Security Features
Your Providence College Office 365 email account includes a number of email security features to protect you and your data from scams, phishing attacks, and identity theft.
Spam Filter
All email accounts come with a spam filter. This automatically quarantines any messages that get flagged by Microsoft as spam or phishing. It also quarantines any messages from senders that a user has blocked. All quarantined messages for the past 24 hours are sent in a single digest to each user once per day from which they can release any messages that were accidentally quarantined. Users can also check their own quarantine at any time by visiting the link below.
External Sender Flag and Banner
Any emails originating from a sender outside of Providence College will be flagged with [External] in the subject and contain a banner at the end of the message warning you that the email originated from outside of the college. This is to help protect our users from scams that pretend to be coming from an official Providence College source.
Data Loss Protection (DLP) Rules
Any emails containing social security numbers or credit card numbers are blocked from being sent. This includes the body of the email along with any attachments or previous messages that may have contained this sensitive information.
If you must send this type of information in an email, we suggest encrypting your email using the method described below.
Email Encryption
The Providence College Office 365 email accounts allow anyone to encrypt an email prior to sending it. This protects the data contained within the email. If you need to send an email that contains personally identifiable information (PII), such as social security numbers or credit card numbers, you must encrypt the message prior to sending it.
Safe Links and Safe Attachments
Safe Links and Safe Attachments are available only on faculty and staff email accounts.
Safe Links is a system which runs a URL through Microsoft’s security services to determine whether or not it points to a compromised or malicious website. You will notice that the URL for any links in emails will be replaced with a Safe Links URL that will redirect you to the desired site upon a successful check. It works seamlessly and promptly. Users should notice no delay in accessing URLs from emails.
Safe Attachments works similarly to Safe Links in that any email attachments are run through an anti-virus system before being delivered. If an attachment is found to be malicious, it will be removed and replaced by a file that states that the malicious attachment was removed.
