Increase in offensive junk email
10 Mar 2017
As you may be aware, several members of University staff have experienced a substantial increase in junk email over the past few weeks
To make matters worse, many of these emails have been extremely offensive and arriving in very large quantities.
Currently, our staff and postgraduate research (PGR) email service blocks and filters out approximately half a million junk emails per day - compared to approximately 200,000 per day in September 2016 - and this rate is showing no signs of slowing down.
We’re in the process of re-configuring our junk mail detection technology, which is being ‘trained’ to recognise the new variety of messages it needs to block. Improvements will not happen overnight, but should be seen over the next few weeks as the system starts to detect newer messages.
We promise that we fully understand how serious, frustrating and deeply unpleasant it is to receive these types of messages, and aside from keeping the service running day to day, dealing with this will continue to be our email team’s highest priority until planned work is completed and the situation significantly improves.
We will issue regular progress updates during this work. Next planned update on Friday 17 March.
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