Email Banner

Owned by Ashley Mattingly
Last updated: Jul 29, 2024 by A.J. Newman
2 min read

Many phishing emails, which attempt to steal your personal data, come from outside of the University. To let you know if a message comes from an external system, a yellow banner that states *Message sent from a system outside of UConn.* will appear at the top of the message. The banner is informative and supplements your assessment of the content. If you do not recognize the external sender or if the message is unexpectedly from an external source, use additional caution before clicking on links, opening attachments, replying, or taking any other actions.

In the reading preview pane in Outlook, the security banner will take up the first line. As a workaround, you can change the number of lines displayed.

  1. Click the View tab.

  2. Click Message Preview.

  3. Select the number of lines you wish displayed (1, 2 or 3).

    1. You can also select Off if you do not want to use the reading preview pane.

Some University-managed services, such as ListServ, Microsoft 365, and HuskyCT, will not be marked as external, but occasionally, an email that appears to come for a uconn.edu address will have a banner. In these cases, the message was sent from an external system but configured to use a UConn address. 

Not all phishing messages come from outside of UConn. Criminals can and do use stolen UConn credentials to send fraudulent emails, and because they originate from within our email system, they will not have a banner. Phishing is an ongoing problem and to protect yourself, you must be careful with all email, especially if you did not initiate the contact or that contain unusual requests. 

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