Email Accounts

In general, Email is a potentially insecure medium, and should not be used for the transmittal of confidential information, or any message you would not wish to see become public or accidentally sent to the wrong person

If you have the need to send confidential information over email,  Microsoft 365 does provide a secure, easy-to-use, feature embedded within Outlook called Office Message Encryption ( OME )

Send an encrypted email in Outlook – IT Help (service-now.com)

Harvard IT uses ProofPoint to manage spam sent to University mailboxes.  Typically, anything filtered by Proofpoint is legitimately spam but on occasion, a message will be flagged as a false positive.  You will receive a ‘Daily Digest’ including any messages quarantined during the day to review, with the option to whitelist any message incorrectly marked as spam.

Manage the Proofpoint Web Console – IT Help (service-now.com)

For any spam or phishing messages that are not intercepted by ProofPoint, Harvard IT recommends you forward the message to [email protected]

Phishing Information Security Incident Reporting | Harvard University Information Security

The amount of information that each of us receives on a daily basis can be overwhelming.

Below you will find a few tips and guides on how to more effectively manage things like your email, calendar, or tasks while using your Microsoft 365 account.

Create Rules to Filter Email

Outlook offers a feature to automatically process your mail and apply workflows based on things like the sender or subject, allowing actions such as moving messages to folders or categories, marking with different priorities, or forwarding to different email accounts.

The steps to create an Inbox rule differ depending on how you access your Outlook email.

Microsoft’s website offers ‘guided support’ that will tailor the instructions based on your choices, depending on whether you check your email via the web browser, a desktop mail client, on a Mac or PC, or a mobile device.

Manage email messages by using rules – Microsoft Support

Your Microsoft 365 access is terminated when you no longer have an active role at Harvard.  For Faculty and Staff this happens fairly abruptly, students however are given a 365 day grace period following graduation.

Visit the following knowledgebase article Prepare to Leave Harvard to learn more.

The school has a variety of mailing lists used to communicate news and events to the community. Some of these lists are required, like the Student, Staff, Faculty, or Researcher mailing lists.

Students are also subscribed to GSD-Fellow-Students list, which is an ‘unofficial’ mailing list that students. Fellow-Students is a GSD Student Forum initiative and GSD Students will be automatically subscribed at the start of each school year with the option of opting out at any time.

Mailman, the platform used for Harvard mailing lists, has the option to receive a daily digest of the list activity rather than receiving individual messages as they are posted.

Though it may not be a good idea to receive digests for the main mailing lists, the GSD-Fellow list may be a great candidate since it can generate a significant amount of emails that you may not want to receive throughout the day and would rather review later.

Request a Digest in a Mailman 3 Mailing List – IT Help (service-now.com)