Email is used as the University's primary communication channel with both staff and students, also with external contacts such as prospective students, academic partners or industrial contacts.

Occasionally, mailshots are sent to individuals, groups of individuals, mailing lists or distribution groups (all of which are slightly different things) but they end up into the Junk Email folder and this can be for many reasons. Here are some guidelines that should reduce the risk of your message going in the Junk folder.

You know what you have to say, and to whom you need to send it. The more recipients decide to mark your messages as Junk, the more likely it is that all your emails will end up in the Junk in the future.

This is a classic hallmark of spam. Rather than Bcc someone, save that for personal communications. If you need to send the same message to lots of internal recipients, use the appropriate distribution group or mailing list.

It's known as 'shouting' and the machines think it looks like Junk. The same applies to the message body – if there are a lot of sentences in capitals, your email is at risk of being classed as Junk.

Spam often contains very long runs of hidden, unrelated text in an attempt to bamboozle the AI/Machine Learning technologies that are used in automated filters. As a result, some filters will rank a message more highly if it contains lots of seemingly unconnected text. Additionally, sending a one-word email to hundreds of people could trigger a Junk classification

Again, this is an old-time spam tactic. If you need to send out large numbers of links, consider putting them on a web page on your department's site or on a module or programme page on Learn, and send a link to that.

In Loughborough's system, these are in the Outlook Address Book with names beginning "Dept." or "School." or detailed on the mailing lists page, which can be found on the IT Services website. Each one of these is a single recipient with many members, so your message is viewed as a single message to each group/list rather than being tens-to-thousands of separate message.

The University does not allow this due to GDPR. There is also no need to do this as you can access email off-campus.