Managing Spam
Spam, also known as junk mail, is any unsolicited or unwanted commercial email sent to recipients in bulk. TMU’s mail system delivers such messages to a spam folder in your TMU Gmail account, unless we detect malicious attachments or prohibited file types such as executable files.
Your spam folder is a good place to look when an email you were expecting does not appear or you don’t recall receiving an email someone says they sent you.
When a legitimate email is incorrectly placed in your spam folder:
- Move the email to your inbox or another folder as messages in the spam folder for more than 30 days will be automatically deleted by the mail system.
- Forward the email with full headers to spamrec@torontomu.ca - this helps improve TMUs spam filtering rules.
If spam comes to your inbox:
- Report it with full headers to spamrec@torontomu.ca - this helps improve TMU’s spam filtering rules.
- Mark it as spam in Gmail using the drop-down menu in the message and selecting Report spam.
Especially when looking at email messages from unknown senders, use caution with any links or attachments. If you must look at an attachment, we recommend using the Gmail preview feature by clicking once on the attachment’s name instead of downloading and opening it on your computer.
See the illustration below where clicking near the document name will open a preview in Gmail.
If a specific email address has been persistently sending you unwanted email, you can block the address in Gmail via these steps: open an email from the address you want to block > use the drop-down menu in the email > Block sender’s name.
You can also set up filters to automatically move email to the spam folder or another folder of your choosing. Please see the Gmail Help (external link, opens in new window) site for more information.