Report Email Abuse

This page reviews reporting email abuse to security; for questions or help regarding email abuse, please visit our Phishing Help webpage.

Unsolicited emails such as phishing attacks and unwanted spam are an increasing problem both at the University and throughout the world. Although University email systems prevent 95% of email abuse, due to the ease of email technology, it is inevitable that some malicious messages will reach your inbox. If you receive a message thought to be abuse, please report it to the Cybersecurity Operations Center by following the instructions below.

Guidelines for dealing with email abuse

Email, Spam Control, How to report a spam or phishing email

How do I report a suspicious email that I have received?

[Note: We are currently using a new tool called the ProofPoint Report Spam Outlook Plugin that will help you report spam to Security in a new and expanded fashion. Please refer to the "Email, Using the Report Spam Outlook Add-in" knowledge base article to use this option instead.]

To report a suspicious email, send the message with full headers to emailabuse@uis.edu. The best way to report messages is to create a new email and attach (drag-n-drop) the suspicious email as an attachment: Forwarding Email Messages as an Attachment

Email sent to: emailabuse@uis.edu is automatically submitted to our vendor for evaluation

  • If the email is determined to be spam, phish, viral, etc, they will generate a new spam signature and automatically update our email relays.  
  • The Email Relays and Security Teams monitor the 'report-spam' queue, however,
    • Because of the high volume, you may not receive a response unless you provide a specific question in your report.
  • If you have questions for security or want to know if an email is legitimate, you can reach out to security@uis.edu or the ITS Help Desk for support.   

[Note: If the email is returned to you as 'undeliverable', that's good news. It means that the phishing attempts are already known about by the spam control software that runs on the Exchange server.]

Questions

  • Contact info for the customer reporting the issue
  • Date/time the phishing email was received
  • Subject line of the email
  • Sender's address
  • Recipient's address
  • Are there hyperlinks in the body of the email; if so, what are the links to?