Proofpoint Email Protection

Colby employs a Proofpoint email security gateway to scan and filter malicious or unsolicited emails. This article explains how this works, how to review what it is doing with your email, and options you have for how your messages are (or aren't) filtered.

Proofpoint email protection is an email security system that helps protect against spam and malicious emails that could steal information or infect your computer. The system examines email messages and filters content that meets certain criteria for spam, junk, fraud, phishing attempts, malicious links or infected file attachments. If an email is determined to be spam or malicious in nature, Proofpoint will place these messages in a quarantine, preventing them from being delivered to your email inbox. Individuals can review their quarantine in a daily digest summary or by accessing the Proofpoint email protection system where messages can be released by the individual if found to be legitimate. Messages in quarantine are stored for 30 days. After 30 days, quarantined messages are deleted. 

Proofpoint is designed to run on top of Google's Gmail anti-spam features, significantly enhancing protective measures against unwanted email. Because of this relationship, messages released or 'safelisted' in Proofpoint could potentially encounter Google's anti-spam filters and still end up in an individual's Gmail spam folder.

Proofpoint Email Filtering Process

Emails delivered to Colby account holders from external addresses (gmail.com, outlook.com, aol.com, etc.) will be filtered through Proofpoint's email protection service. Emails received between Colby accounts will not be filtered. Emails to Google groups (group addresses, i.e. support@colby.edu) will not be filtered, but can be if requested by a group owner/manager. If you require a Google group to be moderated by Proofpoint, please contact the ITS support center. 

Proofpoint Daily Digest

Proofpoint provides a daily digest email showing the messages that it has quarantined over the previous 24-hour period.  The digest will provide the ability to safely view quarantined messages by sender and subject, and permit the recipient to release e-mails to their inbox that they believe are legitimate. An example of a daily digest email is shown below.

Viewing a message

Clicking on the subject line of the message will take to your Proofpoint dashboard where you may safely view its contents.

Releasing a message

Clicking on Release will deliver the email to your inbox. Please note: E-mail released in this matter may end up in your Gmail 'spam' folder. Please be sure to check your spam folder after releasing messages.

Safelisting a sender

Clicking on Safelist will deliver the email to your inbox and place the email sender on a safelist so that future emails from that sender are always delivered to your inbox.

Other options

Request New Summary Digest sends you an updated Summary Digest showing all of your quarantined email plus any email filtered since the last digest was sent.

Request Safe/Blocked Senders List sends a summary of all of your Safe and Blocked Senders.

Manage My Proofpoiont Account accesses your Proofpoint dashboard. You may view quarantined messages, access your safe/blocked senders list, and carry out other management functions.

Help opens up this article. 

Proofpoint Dashboard

In addition to the daily digest email,  the Proofpoint platform also provides an online dashboard that can be accessed by each account holder. The dashboard can be accessed in three different ways:

• Visiting okta.colby.edu and then clicking on the Proofpoint Protection Server app (as shown in the icon below)
• clicking on Manage My Proofpoint Account link provided in the daily email digest.

 

An example of the Proofpoint email protection dashboard is shown below:

 

Proofpoint URL Defense

Proofpoint scans URLs contained in emails in order to determine if they are malicious or misleading. This is done to help you determine quickly that a particular URL has been scanned by the Proofpoint and is safe to click on.  Proofpoint also rescans a URL when it is clicked on from your email in case the status of a URL changes after the initial scan. 

In the above example, URL Defense has scanned for malicious links and rewritten the URLs to make them visible to recipients. These links are now safe to click. 

Here’s what URL Defense does with each email:

1. Proofpoint email protection reviews the message and a link is detected as being misleading or potentially malicious
2. The linked URL is displayed as text
3. The URL is rewritten, introducing the text https://urldefense.com/ to the link, and the email is delivered to the recipient's inbox