Delayed emails suddenly appearing from Blackboard/My Dundee

Delayed emails sent from My Dundee are belatedly arriving to users and are often marked as spam by Outlook.

• Update (09/01/2019): The long term solution has been put in place and we do not anticipate further issues.
• Update (11/01/2019): Although the solution is now in place for this, users continue to receive old messages. This is because the delayed emails are going out in batches. We anticipate that this ‘cleaning out’ process will complete today.

What’s Happening?

Significant numbers of Emails sent from My Dundee, including both module and major system announcements have been identified by Microsoft servers as spam and were therefore blocked. This meant that many users had not received these messages when they were meant to. This blockage has now been resolved, however, this means that many people will be receiving delayed and sometimes duplicate messages from as far back as the 2nd of January.

Instructors sending email from their modules in the last week may have been affected by this resulting in some students not receiving their messages.

Who is affected?

All My Dundee users.

Solution?

The blocked emails have been released. This is resulting in these emails coming through to users late and duplicated in some instances, however, it also means that no emails sent from My Dundee have been lost. It was decided on balance that releasing the messages, though annoying to users,  was better than losing some of the more important messages that were mixed up in the blockage. The alternative was to delete them all and ask anyone who had sent Announcements through My Dundee since the start of the year, to re-send them.

A long term solution has been put in place by UoD IT, working with our vendors Blackboard and Microsoft. Once the last of the blocked emails come through, this behaviour will be resolved.

Note that we have no reason to believe that any emails or announcements have been lost.

Further Information

Please keep an eye on https://uodit.info/ for further updates on this issue. We will also update this post if there are any changes.

We apologise for any inconvenience this issue is causing users.