New Email Protection: Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Posted July 16, 2021 by Academic and Institutional Technology
Tags: Department News

New Email Protection: Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Effective Date: July 20, 2021

On July 20, AIT will be migrating away from Proofpoint to begin using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as our email protection platform.  This service allows us to detect and respond to advanced attacks, while effectively keeping you, your device, and data safe.

Key Benefits and Features

  • Replacing Proofpoint at a substantial cost savings while providing comparable email protection.
  • Protecting employee email from phishing emails.
  • Verifying links and attachments in emails to be sure they are not malicious.
  • Helping reduce the number of unwanted emails you receive.

Impact on College Community

Many of you may not even notice this change.  However, you will no longer be receiving an Email Quarantine Digest from the AIT Service Desk.  AIT will be moving your block-listed and safe-listed senders into Defender for Office 365.  But you should be ready to help the system’s machine learning, meaning that the system will learn from your indication of which types of messages are spam and which are not. This means, when a spam or phishing message comes in, you may need to actively mark it as spam or phish. Follow this quick guide to learn how to help Defender for Office 365 learn your preferences and better protect your mailbox. 

If you have any questions, please contact us at ait.service.desk@wheaton.edu or call 630.752.4357 (HELP).