Anti-spam Policies

The focus of establishing good anti-spam policies is to proactively mitigate spam before it arrives rather than reacting to it with steps like removing it from mailboxes. This is consistent with Microsoft’s approach of training anti-spam algorithms and creating efficiencies for users and IT professionals.

Student mailboxes:
Mail policy established which limits student mailboxes to 200 recipients/hour and 600 recipients/day. Although when the policy was established, it affected accounts that had any “student type” (e.g., student employees, full time employees taking classes), refinements to the policy should only affect students who are not student employees. Note that a distribution group counts as 1 recipient. Mailboxes that exceed those limits will be blocked until the end of the day - we do not have any tools to unblock them.

• Add to sec.its.eis.studentantispambypass

• Criteria for determining if we add students and how long they can be in the group are to be established.

Faculty/Staff mailboxes:
Anti-spam policies under development. Currently, there is no limit but there are notifications sent to the Information Security Office when a staff person sends to more than 300 recipients/hour or 600/day.

• Add to sec.its.eis.facstaffantispambypass

Anti-Spam Policies are not the same as Exchange Online Service Limits!

In addition to our anti-spam policies, Microsoft enforces recipient and message rate limits on all Microsoft customers. These limits cannot be changed.

Current limits are documented at Exchange Online limits - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn