From May you’ll start seeing a yellow banner warning at the top of any emails sent to you from outside the University of Kent. It will say the following:
- CAUTION: This email originated from outside the organisation. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe.
What you need to do
If you see this, please double-check that the sender is a trusted source before you respond or open any attachments.
- Follow these tips for how to spot a fake email.
We’re asking you to look out for fraud in both internal and external emails. Remember the sender’s email can be fake and might appear to be from someone you know at Kent such as a student or staff member, or an organisation you interact with such as student finance.
The message content may seem plausible at first, so you must treat unusual email requests and unexpected messages with suspicion.
Why it matters
Members of universities and public institutions are increasingly being targeted and receiving fraudulent and malicious emails that can be very convincing. We all need to be vigilant.
More about protecting the University from online threats
Is there any way to produce this warning outside the body of the email?
The current implementation causes two problems; one trivial but annoying, and one counter-productive:
1. As Alex says, it makes previews of the email body useless: In Outlook they all just read “CAUTION: This email originated”.
2. Every message I receive which has been digitally signed is tagged as suspect, because the body of the message has been changed by the insertion of the warning. This negates the value of the signature in the first place.
I was wondering if there was a way we could opt out of this feature? I do prefer to keep it disabled as I already check emails, know fraudulent ones, and this feature removes the preview on Email apps such as Apple Mail. Best