Suspicious Email? What do you do?

This Articles applies to: Everyone
Howdy,

When you see a suspicious email what do you do? Most people want to tell someone in IT. The question then is what information do you give them and who do you specifically contact?

The answer to the first part is send EVERYTHING, and the only way to do this is to send the email as an attachment. There's a lot of information in an email forwarded as an attachment and very little in an email that is merely forwarded. The former contains header information that you don't see and is lost when you simply forward the email.

In Outlook, you can forward as an attachment easily. With either the email highlighted or open. Just press Ctrl + Alt + F. That's it. This will open a new email with the suspicious one attached.

Now to whom do you send it? That's easy too. We set up Outlook on your computers as a client that connects to a server. You're going to want to send it to the people who maintain the server and that's TAMU IT at security@tamu.edu. They can also forward it to their firewall group to block any malicious links that may be in the body of the email.