Frequently asked questions E-mail students

Never just blindly open an attachment!
Be careful with attachments. If it is an unsolicited email, the subject is empty or ambiguous, it is best to delete the entire email. Under no circumstances should you click links to websites in this kind of email either.

When the email comes from someone you know or from whom you are expecting an email, first save the attachment to your hard drive and scan the file with your antivirus programme. Be careful if the email does come from a known person, but the text doesn’t match what you would expect from that person’s style, or if the content does not match the subject.
If the antivirus programme confirms that there is a virus in the attachment, delete the file in question as quickly as possible.

If in doubt, contact the sender to verify that he or she has sent the attached email.

If you want to report a suspicious e-mail that you received on your KU Leuven mailbox, you can forward said message to abuse [at] kuleuven.be.

More information on online security can be found on our e-mune page.

Usually it concerns commercial e-mails, better known as SPAM.

Spammers send their emails to thousands of people at once. Of course they do not do this using single emails, but in mass instalments. These instalments are split up alphabetically. For example, an email will be sent at the same time to all the people named Peter.

One of the characteristics of spam is that multiple addressees are sent the email at the same time. To avoid this characteristic being used to spot a spam email, all senders are concealed except one. That way it appears that only one person is the recipient (in the To field, e.g. Peter Peeters). All other addressees are hidden (in the Bcc field, Blind Carbon Copy). In this way, it looks like you have received an email intended for Peter Peeters, when your name is actually Peter Janssens, for example.

So this is not an error on your email provider’s part, but is simply a typical characteristic of SPAM.

More online security-related information can be found on our e-mune page.

1. Start out by using your mailbox’s search function.

2. Check the Deleted Items folder. (You can search both your archive’s Deleted Items folder and your mailbox’s Deleted Items folder.)

3. Recover your Deleted Items and search these.

4. If all previous steps were completed without result, please send us the following information to recover the email(s)/folder:

Your mailbox will be deleted within 14 days of the start of the new academic year. That will usually be about the 2nd week of October. Once your mailbox has been deleted, it will no longer be possible to recover it, which is why it is important to export your emails in advance.

Use IMAP to configure your mailbox in a mail software client such as Outlook or Thunderbird and you can drag your emails to a personal folder (.pst file) that you can save on your computer.

This page lists instructions for configuring your mailbox: https://admin.kuleuven.be/icts/services/email/m365/configuratie-in-thunderbird-via-imap

KU Leuven supplies its students with a free licence for Office 365 ProPlus as part of a general agreement with Microsoft, and which includes the Outlook client. icts.kuleuven.be/sc/english/software/officestudents

Staff email addresses can be found via the Who’s Who.

A student’s email address can be found using the search function in KU Leuven students. Students can elect not to appear in this programme’s searches.

There are various protocols to manage email on your computer via a client (for example: Exchange, SMTP, IMAP, etc.). POP is one of these, but is no longer supported by KU Leuven.

The reason for this is that when using POP, your emails get deleted on the server and transferred locally to the computer you are currently using. That means that no copy is saved on the server. In other words, you do not have a backup if you lose the emails on your computer.

We recommend using MS Outlook and webmail in as many cases as possible.

It is not possible to set forwards from KU Leuven mailboxes to other mailboxes (KU Leuven or external) on server level. You can however configure your student mailbox in a mail client of your choosing & set a rule in the program to forward it to a KU Leuven mail address of your choice.

To configure your mail client, you can use the IMAP setting found here.

Your mailbox is also accessible off the KU Leuven network, so, e.g. when abroad.
There’s not much difference between opening your mailbox on your local computer and on a computer on the other side of the world.
All you need is access to the internet.

We recommend using webmail via a browser: https://outlook.com/owa/kuleuven.be.

Certain files in an email attachment cannot be opened in Outlook and/or in Webmail/OWA for security reasons.
For example, certain files may contain viruses that would infect your computer if you opened the attachment.

Sometimes these files are unusable (you cannot open them and you cannot save the files), and sometimes you cannot open the files directly, but you can save the files first and then open them.

Outlook and Webmail/OWA behaviour may differ because each email client comes with particular risks.

To avoid this problem, you could ask the sender to first zip the attachments, for example. KU Leuven does not wish to modify any of the default settings with regard to security.

Here is an example of the default settings of Webmail/OWA in January 2010:

Unknown files must first be saved. In other words, if the file type is unknown, the file must be saved to disk outside the email client.

At the top of the page, select Settings  and turn off Focused Inbox.

More information can be found on the following page.