Increased chance of SPAM/phishing mails in Science mailbox

The RU contract with the anti-SPAM/anti-phishing service Proofpoint expired September 21, 2023, which means that ‘Proofpoint End User Digest’ mails are not sent anymore after that date.

C&CZ is migrating Science mailboxes to the anti-SPAM/anti-phishing service of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection. There is an increased chance of receiving SPAM/phishing mails in the Science mailbox during this migration period.

P.S. the RU central mailboxes (with addresses ending in @ru.nl) have already been migrated to Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.

Update 1: Microsoft support has been asked to evaluate the FNWI filter rules, after initially discouraging results.

Update 2: the FNWI filter rule set was fixed, thus decreasing the number of quarantined mails being forwarded from @ru.nl addresses.

Update 3: mails for the domain @student.science.ru.nl are used to train the Exchange Online Protection AI.

Update 4: Christmas usually is a phishing season, which means that we’ll have migrated all FNWI mail domains at the end of December.

Update 5: Microsoft Exchange Online uses about 500.000 servers which may not end up in (our/remote) blocklists which has been fixed after servers had been blocked.

Update 6: the current situation is frozen for now, where only a few domains are using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.