20190425_Elephant at the Metal Zoo flickr photo by Damien Walmsley shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license

A couple of weeks ago I had a feeling that my emails weren’t working properly. I couldn’t work out what was happening, but sometimes I sent an email and got no response at all. But I didn’t think much about it until I sent an email a couple of times about something time critical to somebody I knew was awaiting my email, and followed it up with a Teams message when there was no response.

Anyway, after this I put a request over the help desk with a couple of dates and times of emails I thought were not getting through and asked them to look into it. Later that day, as I was out and about, I got a Teams message from a guy who identified himself as “Threat and Vulnerability Lead” at UofG who told me what was happening.

Back in late 2023 I changed my Outlook signature to include a link to my Mastodon profile. I still had a link to my Twitter/X in the same signature, you might like to note. And, on Feb 27th 2025 Microsoft decided that this Mastodon link was “malicious”. Yes, that’s right – nearly 18 months after I added it to my signature.

I removed the link – as the IT guy said, it wasn’t something UofG were doing or within their control. But it annoys the hell out of me that MS are flagging up a link to Mastodon as malicious while ignoring my Twitter/X link. (I removed that as well, by the way).

Go figure!