This May the UF community was notified that the NSF, and other federal granting agencies, had implemented a new email protocol in order to comply with DHS Binding Operational Directive 18-01. Implementation of the new protocol has led to some UF community members missing out on important emails from their granting agencies.
The protocol, DMARC, enables organizations to verify that their outgoing email was sent from a trusted source. Emails originating from a DMARC enabled system will only originate from a specific and approved set of email servers. This insures a level of trust, minimizing the chance that email originated from systems that are in control of spammers, hackers, or phishers.
The problem we have discovered happens when someone automatically forwards their UF email to an off-campus account, usually Gmail. In this situation, emails are automatically re-routed by UF servers and because it looks as if the email came from UF rather than the system authorized by DMARC, Gmail automatically discards the email.
There is nothing we can do about this. The implementation of DMARC was mandated by the Department of Homeland Security and this is a normal behavior of the system. DHS Binding Operational Directive 18-01 can be found online at https://cyber.dhs.gov/bod/18-01/.
However, there is something you can do about this – if you are automatically forwarding your UF email to an off-campus account, then work with your IT team to disable the automatic forward. Besides, in 2016, UF implemented a policy that prohibits individuals from automatically forwarding their UF business email to off-campus systems, so although they did not disable any existing automatic forwards, it is against UF policy. The UF email policy can be found at https://it.ufl.edu/policies/email/electronic-mail/.