Introduction

This article is provided for any UAlberta email user that is having issues with inbound email being blocked by Gmail's spam filters. 

Applicability

This applies to all UAlberta.ca email users. 

Details

The University of Alberta has implemented industry standard email spam filtering strategies to protect our account holders from unsolicited and potentially harmful emails. Using advanced firewalls, industry managed reputation based block Lists, and Gmail’s built in spam filtering, the U of A has significantly reduced the amount of spam emails landing in CCID account holder’s inboxes. 

However, this does come with the possibility that legitimate emails to ualberta.ca email addresses aren't delivered, get blocked or redirected to spam before making it to a ualberta.ca inbox. The most common reasons for this are:

• The sender’s email system is improperly configured and therefore does not meet email security standards
• The sender's email domain has a poor reputation online and has been blacklisted (usually temporarily)
• The email’s content is suspicious (masked hyperlinks, content is similar to spam emails, etc)
• The email's attachments have suspicious content or are in a format that is blocked 
• The sender mistyped the recipient’s email address

NOTE: Sometimes email servers for popular online platforms like Instagram or Facebook will get publicly blacklisted. This may temporarily interrupt email delivery from those platforms to UAlberta email accounts for 24 hours or longer. If this happens to you, please follow the recommendations below. IST cannot whitelist emails from these services.

What can you do if you’re not receiving an email from an external sender?

As the large majority of emails that are blocked or throttled by university mail systems are a result of a problem on the sender's end and there is typically very little that the IST can do to resolve the issues. 

IST recommends you do the following: 

1. Add the sender to your email contact list. This will make the email address “trusted” and significantly reduce the likelihood of it getting flagged as spam.
2. Mark any previous emails as “Not spam”. This will teach the spam filters that you want to receive emails from this sender and reduce the likelihood of future emails getting flagged as spam.
3. Try again in 24 hours. Typically if a domain gets publicly blacklisted it is temporary and removed after 24 hours - assuming the sender is legitimate and/or fixes their issue. If the problem persists after 24 hours, proceed to the next step.
4. Contact the IT support of the organization that you are expecting email from. If it is required, IST can work with 3rd party support to resolve the issue.

Beware of Phishing!

Phishing is a type of cyber attack that tries to trick you into entering your personal information, such as your password or banking information, into a fraudulent website. UAlberta and Google spam protection services are in place to deflect as many of these malicious emails as possible and prevent them from making it to your inbox. Any time you are taking an email out of your spam label, or if an email is asking for your personal information, it is important to spend the time to ensure the email is legitimate.