Email Safety Tips in Office 365
Today’s spam and malware attacks are sometimes so well crafted they may look like legitimate emails to your users. Putting messages into the Junk Email folder isn’t enough. Microsoft has rolled out Safety Tips in Exchange Online Protection (EOP), which provides a warning to the user in an email that is marked suspicious or a reassurance when a message is safe. When you check your email in Outlook or Outlook on the web, EOP automatically checks the sender and adds a safety tip to the top of the email. Every email message will not receive a safety tip.
Note: This is by design a safety feature to warn users if the person sending an email is not actually authorized to send on behalf of that Domain. This security feature is designed to protect users from “spoof” messages where someone is pretending to send an email as someone else. We have all seen many of these fake emails coming into our inbox and some are blatantly fake but there are others that are well crafted and cause trick users into clicking on a malicious link or logging into a fake site designed to capture the user’s login information.
The warning message is meant to bring to your attention that this email is not actually being sent from the sender account but is being sent from a listserv or known email mailbox on behalf of the sender.
If you know the message is from a valid source and is not malicious you can safely ignore the Safety Tip.
Safety Tips
Suspicious mail (red safety tip).
A red safety tip in an email means that the message you received contains something suspicious, such as a phishing scam. Microsoft recommend that you delete this kind of email message from your inbox without opening it.
Spam (yellow safety tip).
A yellow safety tip in an email means that the message has been marked as spam. If you don’t recognize and trust the sender of the message, don’t download any attachments or pictures and don’t click any links in the message. In Outlook on the web, you can click It’s not spam in the yellow bar of a junk mail item to move the message to your inbox. If the yellow safety tip appears on a message that was delivered to your inbox, it’s probably there because you’ve disabled moving spam to your Junk Email folder.
Safe mail (green safety tip).
In addition to unsafe messages, we’ll also tell you about valid messages from senders we trust with a green safety tip. A green safety tip in an email means that we checked the sender of the message and verified that it’s safe. Microsoft maintains this list of trusted senders which includes financial organizations and others that are frequently spoofed or impersonated.
Unfiltered mail (gray safety tip).
We’ll also tell you when we skipped checking a mail because it's from a sender you trust on your Safe Senders list or if a mail flow rule exists to bypass filtering.
The gray safety tip also shows up when external images are blocked, that is, the message is in your inbox and doesn't appear to be spam, but contains external images that you haven't opted to download.