UW-IT has information regarding email security on the following page:
UW-IT protecting your email guidance
The page includes information about what to do if you receive suspicious emails.
Tag Archives: email
Office 365 SLA (Service Level Agreement)
Many of us expect email to be delivered instantly. Although it is usually very fast, there are many factors that affect the delivery time and most of us have unreasonable expectations based on the service that we use. This article will hopefully explain some of the things that can affect the delivery of email and spell out the level of service guaranteed by Microsoft.
In summary:
- The service design goal of Exchange Online is the delivery of email in less than one minute, but this is an average over a month and not for any one email message.
- Broken is considered an average delay of greater than 10 minutes over a month, again this is an average and does not apply to any individual email message.
- Any one message is considered delayed after three hours at which point the sender should get an information email.
- Any one message that is not delivered in three days is failed and the sender will get a NDR (Non-Delivery Report).
There are also other factors that affect the delivery of email.
- Exchange on-premise adds additional delay for Exchange Online users, this is usually under one minute (20-30 seconds seems normal) but can be up to five minutes. Currently, because of a requirement of a small number of users, all Exchange Online email is routed through an on-premise Exchange server. If there is a delay, this is usually where it occurs rather than with any Microsoft infrastructure.
- That said, routing email through an on-premise Exchange server has mitigated numerous other risks with corresponding cost reductions that would have been incurred by addressing them. It also lets the UW comply with ISO 27001, ISO 27018, Safe Harbor, SSAE16 SOC1 Type II, SOC2 Type II and FISMA. Very few cloud-only (or even any) email providers can claim this.
How to add your UW Exchange Online (UW Microsoft 365) to your mobile device
UW-IT recommends using the Outlook mobile app for receiving and sending emails on your mobile device. The Outlook mobile app is zero cost and available for both Apple iOS and Android devices via their respective app stores.
Guidance for spam and phishing protections
UW-IT’s information about how to enable and maintain spam protections for UW Office 365 Exchange Online email accounts is on this web page:
iSchool IT recommends following the steps in the “Enable” and “Maintain” sections of the web page linked above.
Even after configuring settings as recommended on the web page linked above, it is still possible for spam and phishing emails to make it to your inbox. When you do receive suspicious emails, follow the guidance in the “What you can do” section of this web page:
https://itconnect.uw.edu/connect/email/resources/protecting-your-email/
Mailbox best practices when using Microsoft Outlook – how to keep your Mailbox small
Microsoft Outlook stores data (E-mail, Calendar items, Contacts, etc.) in a file. If you use Outlook at home and like many users are not connected to an Exchange server, the file is called a PST (Personal Storage) file and is stored on your computer. If you are employed as a faculty or staff member at the iSchool or another business and connect to an Exchange server, the file is called an OST (Offline Storage) file. It contains copies of all the data, which is subsequently stored on the server.
Regardless of what type of file you have, the size of this file is limited if you want good performance and reliability. Although the absolute maximum size of OST files keeps growing (at the UW the limit is currently 100GB), for optimal performance we recommend you keep your OST file much smaller, less than 10GB is ideal.
These instructions will explain some best practices so that your mail store (read: Mailbox size) never grows too much and shows you how to determine the size of your mail store.
NOTE – this process can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete (depending on the size of your Mailbox), so please allow enough time.
General Best Practices
- Regularly empty your Junk E-Mail and Deleted Items folders.
- Don’t save attachments in Outlook. Instead, save the files to your cloud storage, your computer (or some other media), and then delete the message. At the iSchool your computer is backed up so all the files saved locally will be safe.
- Do not send messages to yourself.
- Do not send large (read: bigger than a couple of MB) attachments via email, instead put the file in the cloud and send a link to the location so the recipient can view or download it.
- If you do forward a message with a large attachment, delete the item from your Sent Items. There is no need to keep the file in your Inbox and your Sent Items folder.
Outlook Microsoft 365
1) Check to see how big your mail store is.
– In the left pane of Outlook, right-click your account and select Data File Properties.
– Under the General tab click Folder Size.
2) Sort mail by size.
– In the left pane of Outlook expand Search Folders.
– Click on Large Mail to activate it. By default, your large mail items will be sorted by size with the largest on top. Since large items always contain attachments now you can easily save the files and delete the messages.
3) Using the Mailbox Cleanup tool.
– Click the File menu > Tools > Mailbox Cleanup
– We recommend all the options in the Mailbox Cleanup tool except AutoArchive. We do not ever recommend archiving your email and instead always recommend keeping all of it in your Exchange Mailbox.
– The Cleanup tool can remove redundant messages in any folder or any conversation. Cleaning up redundant items in conversations is a great way to free up space. Here is a video demo of the Cleanup tool, the “Clean Up Conversation” feature is mentioned at 5:12:
Outlook on the web
1) Check to see how big your mail store is.
– Click the gear icon (Settings) > View all Outlook settings > General > Storage
2) Clean up your Mailbox.
– While in Storage, empty your Deleted Items folder.
3) Apply Retention Policies.
– Right click every top level/parent folder and select Assign policy. We recommend choosing 6 Month or 1 Year.