Find and release quarantined messages as a user in Office 365
As an Office 365 user, you can manage messages that were sent to quarantine instead of sent to you in one of two ways: by responding to spam notifications sent to you directly or by using the Quarantine section.
View messages that were sent to quarantine instead of to you
- Spam notifications sent to your Inbox
Look in your Inbox for a message sent from quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com with subject Spam Notification: X New Messages
- Security & Compliance Center
Go directly to the Quarantine page, use this URL: https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine?rfr=OfficeScc. Your quarantine message(s) will appear on the screen.
By default, Quarantine displays all email messages that have been quarantined as spam. The messages are sorted from newest to oldest based on the Time the message was received. Subject, Sender, and the expiration date (under Expires) are also displayed for each message. You can sort on a field by clicking the corresponding column header; click a column header a second time to reverse the sort order.
You can view a list of all quarantined messages, or you can search for specific messages by filtering. You can only do bulk operations on up to 100 items, so filtering can also help reduce your result set if you have more than one message. You can quickly filter messages for a single quarantine reason by choosing an option from the drop-down list. Options include:
- Mail identified as spam. These quarantined messages are shown by default.
- Mail identified as bulk mail.
After you find a specific quarantined message, click the message to view details about it, and take actions. You can release the message to your mailbox, preview the message, download the message, or delete the message from quarantine immediately.
Manage your quarantined messages
After you select a message or group of messages, you have several options for managing messages in quarantine.
- Do nothing. If you choose to do nothing, the message will be deleted by Office 365 automatically upon expiration. Remember, when Office 365 deletes a message from quarantine, you can't get it back.
- Preview message. (Click the three dots next to Share email) If you choose preview message, the message will display on the screen before you release the message to your Inbox.
- Release message Release a quarantined message (or set of messages) so that the message is sent to your mailbox. When you release a message, you have the option to report the message to Microsoft for analysis.
When you choose to report a message, also called reporting a message as a false positive, the message is reported to the Microsoft Spam Analysis Team. The team evaluates and analyzes false positive messages, and, depending on the results of the analysis, the service-wide spam content filter rules may be adjusted to allow these messages through.
- Download message Lets you download the message as a .eml file. Once you download a message, you can review the .eml file using your email client prior to releasing the message.
- Delete from quarantine Deletes the message immediately from quarantine without releasing the message to your mailbox.