Security Features

Your GatorMail inbox is a valuable tool for sending and receiving important university communications. This makes it an attractive target for malicious activity – including phishing and spam.

UF Information Technology routinely evaluates UF’s Microsoft Outlook environment to improve the security of our emailing services and protect the university community.

Report Suspected Phishing

If you receive a suspicious email in your GatorMail inbox, click the Phish Alert Report button in the top right of your email or forward the email as an attachment to abuse@ufl.edu.

New Security Features

Advanced Phishing Threshold

The Advanced Phishing Threshold security feature provides spoof protection, mailbox intelligence, sophisticated AI-generated phishing and impersonation protection.

This feature may result in an increase in the quarantine emails from Microsoft 365 Security at quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com that should be reviewed.

Microsoft’s quarantine email notification contains a link to your Quarantine page, with categories of “Prevented phish” and “Prevented spam,” and options to “Review,” “Release,” or “Block” the message(s). When releasing an email from quarantine from the Quarantine page, you can also select to “Report” messages as having no threat, which will help train Microsoft to more accurately identify phishing and spam messages.

Outbound Spam Action

Limiting the number of recipients someone may send to 500 per hour or 1,000 per day helps protect UF's email reputation and reduces the impact of malicious outbound email in the event of a compromised GatorLink account. This limit only applies to emails sent directly from your GatorLink account mailbox.

The Internal and External recipients limit per hour are both set to 500. Outbound Spam Action is based on a recipient per hour per day count. More information for support options to send above these limits is available on our Sending Bulk Email from GatorLink Account Mailboxes webpage.

Safe Attachments for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams

Safe Attachments for SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams provides an extra layer of protection against harmful files and helps detect and block existing files identified as malicious.

When Safe Attachments for SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams identifies a file as malicious, the file is locked using direct integration with the file stores.

If a file is found to be malicious, you will see the following indication next to the file:

Safe Documents

Safe Documents scans files from the internet and other potentially unsafe online locations. When you open a document from a potentially unsafe source, the document opens in Protected View (Read-only mode) while it is analyzed.

While the file is being analyzed, you cannot immediately leave Protected View nor begin editing the document.

For documents determined to be safe, you can enable editing and continue working on the document. For documents determined to be malicious, editing remains blocked, and you will see a warning that the file contains malicious content.

Safety Tips

Safety Tips provide a visual banner on emails that helps you make informed decisions when a message is a first contact attempt or appears to be an impersonation attempt.

You may see either banner below in this event: