How do I check my quarantined email list?

For customers using ProofPoint, please see this guide instead. Otherwise, continue reading! 

Possible scenarios:

• I'm missing an email I was supposed to receive
• I'm not receiving emails from a specific sender (and I want those emails!)
• These missing emails are not showing up in my Junk Email folder either! 

If your emails are going missing and you can't seem to find them (and you've already checked your Junk Email folder within your mailbox), it may be time to review your Office 365 Quarantine list.

The Office 365 (O365) spam filter will automatically assign a "spam confidence level" number to an email message - this number is determined by a multitude of factors set by Microsoft. If the number is high enough, it may be automatically moved to your O365 quarantined email list.

You'll typically get an email notification for any quarantined emails about 24 hours after they have been quarantined. These email notifications will look like this:

Some important things to note about the above email:

1. At the top we can see it comes from an official Microsoft email address.
2. In the body of the message, we can see how long we have (21 days as of the received date) to review this message until it is automatically and permanently deleted (we cannot retrieve them after that). 
3. We can see a brief preview of the Sender, Subject, and Date Sent, followed by some quick action buttons that allow us to Block the Sender, Release the email from quarantine, or Review the email in more (and safe) detail within the O365 Quarantine center. 

How to manually check and release quarantined emails

In case you've lost track of the Microsoft Quarantine notification email, you can check your quarantined messages manually by navigating to https://protection.office.com/quarantine. If prompted, please sign in with your full work email address and password, authenticating as applicable to your organization's security policies. 

In the Quarantine center, you'll see any quarantined messages up for review. Click on a message to view more options. 

From here you can do the following:

Release the message

Clicking on the Release message button will release the message to your Inbox. When you click on the button, it will ask you to confirm before releasing the message from quarantine, and it will give you the option to send a report to Microsoft so they can analyze and update their spam filter settings. 

Remove it from quarantine

Clicking on the Remove from quarantine button will permanently delete the message. When you click on the button, it will ask you to confirm before removing the message from quarantine. 

View the message header

You likely don't need to click this button unless we ask you for the message header information, which we can use to see more details about the email. The message header will include the aforementioned "spam confidence level" number, along with other useful information for CTD staff to analyze.

Preview the message

Clicking on the Preview message button will let you do just that within the safety of a Microsoft window. It's still not recommended to click on any links, though you can hover over them to see a preview of the URL. If the URL seems suspicious, you can either Remove the email from quarantine or ask us for more assistance.

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Related:

• How do I block senders or add emails to the safe senders list?
• Privacy and Security Guidelines
• How do I report spam emails?

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to the Help Desk. We're happy to help!