As of June 3rd, 2024, Emerson has retired its use of Mimecast for email security. In its place, we are using a product called Abnormal Security for advanced email detection, in addition to Gmail's existing malicious email filtering.
Mimecast was known as an "email gateway," where external email sent to and from emerson.edu would be temporarily stored, scanned, and processed on Mimecast's servers. Abnormal Security, in contrast, simply enhances Gmail's existing spam scanners, but keeps all core functionality within Gmail.
Therefore, after June 3rd, a number of things will change:
- No more Postmaster emails. Instead, all detected spam will deliver to your Gmail Spam folder (or as Gmail calls them, "labels"). Solicitations and otherwise suspicious email will deliver to a new folder/label in Gmail called Graymail. If you believe you are missing a message, all you have to do is check those two locations: Spam or Graymail. Unlike Mimecast, there is no separate portal to log into with Abnormal. You may find it is the case that a solicitation will deliver to your Inbox, and then a moment later, move to Graymail, because Abnormal flagged it as Graymail immediately after delivery.
- No more delays when clicking links in email. You may have noticed that in the past, Mimecast would transform URLs in the body of emails so they could be scanned for malware. Abnormal does not perform these checks, and instead relies on its language and machine learning to reliably detect malware.
- If you want to block or approve a sender, you just do it in Gmail. No more logging into Mimecast or using the Postmaster emails to block or approve domains. See our guide on Blocking, Approving, and Filtering Email to learn how. If you have curated a personal Approve and Deny list in Mimecast, this will not be ported over to Abnormal, but we are confident that Abnormal's enhanced detection will reliably block and approve email appropriately.
- Encrypt Gmail messages with Confidential Mode. Rather than using the [ENCRYPT] method of encrypting email with Mimecast, we will use the built-in Confidential Mode with Gmail to encrypt messages. To enable Confidential Mode when composing an email in Gmail, simply click the Lock
icon at the bottom of Gmail, and you will have enhanced options to secure your message.
- Train Gmail and Abnormal to know what email you do and don't want. To train Gmail and Abnormal's filters, you can click Mark as Spam at the top of a message in Gmail, or Not Spam. If a message delivers to Graymail that should have been delivered to your Inbox, simply move it to your Inbox to train the filter.
- Emails determined to be "malicious" by Abnormal will be sent to the Trash. Like all Trashed items, they will purge after 30 days.
Please make sure to release any messages you need in your Postmaster emails prior to July 1st, 2024.
For up to date guides on using Gmail for confidential mode, filtering, mail merge and more, see our Gmail at Emerson College guide.
We believe this move will significantly improve both spam detection and the user experience for our community. For any questions, please email helpdesk@emerson.edu.