Missing emails: check your Deleted Items folder
UEA students may have noticed the following two Microsoft Outlook email issues over the past few days:
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Delay or duplication of emails that were sent and received between 5am and 9pm on Friday (3 November).
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Already delivered emails disappearing from mailboxes, affecting emails delivered after 1am on Wednesday (1 November) and before 1am on Saturday (4 November).
These are due to Microsoft’s security algorithm mistakenly detecting the URL associated with the X (previously Twitter) icon in UEA signatures as being high risk for phishing, an issue which
has now been resolved by ITCS.
The majority of affected emails have now been automatically restored to inboxes, however students are advised by ITCS to check their ‘Deleted Items’ for any other missing emails (see below for
information on how to do this).
ITCS have been working to identify emails incorrectly quarantined and releasing them back into inboxes. Out of approximately
57,000 quarantined emails, around
30,000 have already been released to inboxes, with the remainder being released shortly.
No email was permanently deleted by this incident, so all emails will still be in mailboxes.
If you are concerned about a business critical email that was sent out during the period that we had the issues, you may want to resend it just to make sure it has not been quarantined by the
receiving party.
How to check for emails in your Deleted Items folder
Approximately 8,200 emails that had already been delivered before the incident have also been moved from inboxes, or other mailbox folders, to ‘Deleted Items’
folders. It is not possible for ITCS to automate moving these emails back into inboxes so they are advising staff and students do the following:
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Check your Deleted Items folder for emails dated between
1am on Wednesday and 1am on Saturday. If there are emails that should be returned to your inbox, then:
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Left click and hold on the email to move and drag it back to the Inbox, or any other relevant folder. (Note: You can select multiple emails and move them all with one action by holding Ctrl and clicking on the relevant
emails.)
If you have set up a mailbox rule set to empty your
Deleted Items folder when you close your email client, then these emails have been moved into your
Recover Deleted Items folder. (If you do not have a ‘Recover Deleted Items’ folder in Outlook, this will not apply.)
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Check your Recover Deleted Items folder and if there are emails that should be returned to your Inbox then:
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In your Deleted Items folder, click
Recover items recently removed from this folder to open the Recover Deleted Items folder.
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Select the emails that need to be recovered. You can select multiple items by Left Shift clicking, ensure
Restore Select Items is selected and clicking OK.
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This will restore the selected emails to the
Deleted Items folder. Follow the above process to move these emails back to the Inbox or any other relevant folder.
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