Higher Education

Hi all, 

I hope you are well!

I wanted to reach out to see if anyone in the higher education community has come across something similar and might have advice or suggestions.

One of our users recently forwarded an event-related email to us that included a warning banner from our university's email defense system:

"Warning! The University of Texas at Austin email defense system has identified the following message as possibly containing malicious content. Please use extreme caution in vetting this message, especially if the message asks you to click on a URL or to login to a web page that you do not confidently recognize."

We followed up with our Help Desk, and they explained that these warnings are typically triggered when:

• The "From" or "Reply-to" address is not a utexas.edu domain (though in this case, it was).
• The message contains language that resembles spam, based on industry standards.
• The message includes links to potentially suspicious websites or is mostly made up of links with minimal text.
• The content is similar to other messages previously flagged as spam.

According to the help desk, if none of these conditions are present, the warning shouldn't appear.

While this is clearly an internal filtering issue, I'm curious if others have experienced similar situations-especially when sending legitimate event communications-and how you've approached it. Have you found any effective ways to reduce the chances of these messages being flagged?

Thanks in advance for any insights you're willing to share!

------------------------------
Seth Curlee
Cvent Administrator
The University of Texas at Austin
------------------------------

Hi Seth - I've run into similar issues as USC has tightened their email security protocols. Even though it's an email address with your university's domain, it's still a third-party sender. I had to set up a new email address that wasn't a top-level domain (@orient.usc.edu instead of @usc.edu) and redo all the DMARC permissions. I think I'm still waiting on a ticket to stop adding the external sender warning banner. I don't know if I have any advice other than offering solidarity! Hopefully your IT cybersecurity area can help more with this.

------------------------------
Christine D'Arcy
Cvent Application Administrator
University of Southern California
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-13-2025 12:05
From: Seth Curlee
Subject: Warning Message on Event Email - Anyone else experienced this?

Hi all, 

I hope you are well!

I wanted to reach out to see if anyone in the higher education community has come across something similar and might have advice or suggestions.

One of our users recently forwarded an event-related email to us that included a warning banner from our university's email defense system:

"Warning! The University of Texas at Austin email defense system has identified the following message as possibly containing malicious content. Please use extreme caution in vetting this message, especially if the message asks you to click on a URL or to login to a web page that you do not confidently recognize."

We followed up with our Help Desk, and they explained that these warnings are typically triggered when:

• The "From" or "Reply-to" address is not a utexas.edu domain (though in this case, it was).
• The message contains language that resembles spam, based on industry standards.
• The message includes links to potentially suspicious websites or is mostly made up of links with minimal text.
• The content is similar to other messages previously flagged as spam.

According to the help desk, if none of these conditions are present, the warning shouldn't appear.

While this is clearly an internal filtering issue, I'm curious if others have experienced similar situations-especially when sending legitimate event communications-and how you've approached it. Have you found any effective ways to reduce the chances of these messages being flagged?

Thanks in advance for any insights you're willing to share!

------------------------------
Seth Curlee
Cvent Administrator
The University of Texas at Austin
------------------------------