Overview
The Exchange Online Protection (EOP) service will send a spam summary message to your inbox on a periodic basis. If your account receives a large number of spam messages, these messages will arrive once a day. If you don't receive as many, the notifications will arrive less frequently.
If you have not received an EOP ESN spam summary message recently and are concerned that an email you are expecting has been flagged, consider logging directly into Office 365 Quarantine web interface (security.microsoft.com/quarantine) to check. This process is detailed here.
Additionally, Microsoft Outlook is the official enterprise email application for the University of Pittsburgh. Accessing email through an auto-forwarded external address, reduces the security protection of accounts.
Detail
- Open the spam notification message. It will always originate from the address EOP ESN <quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com> and will have the subject line "Microsoft 365 security: You have messages in quarantine"
- The email will show how many new messages are being held for review since the last EOP email.
- You have 30 days from the received date to review them.
- For each message, you can choose Review Message, Release, or Block Sender.
- In addition to using the quick action links, you can always view your quarantine by navigating to https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine.
Review Message lets you view the message details and decide the best course of action.
- Purpose: This action provides you with more details about the quarantined email, allowing you to verify if it is legitimate or should be deleted.
- What Happens: Selecting "Review" opens a preview pane or navigates you to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, where you can see the message's content, header information, and often a reason for its quarantine.
- Next Steps: From the review pane, you can then choose to Release the message, Block the sender, or Delete it from quarantine.
Release moves the message to your inbox.
- Purpose: To move a legitimate email that was mistakenly quarantined back to your inbox.
- What Happens: The message is removed from the quarantine folder and delivered to your Outlook inbox.
- Considerations: Never release an email that you were not already anticipating, or that you cannot verify as legitimate through a previously established trusted line of communication. Microsoft has a high degree of confidence that quarantined emails are not legitimate.
Block Sender adds the sender to your block list so their future messages are sent to Junk Email or remain in quarantine. These options allow you to manage unwanted or mistakenly flagged emails effectively.
- Purpose: To prevent future unwanted emails from a specific sender from reaching your inbox.
- What Happens: The sender's email address is added to your Blocked Senders list, ensuring that all future messages from that sender are automatically moved to your Junk Email folder or remain in the quarantine folder, as determined by your administrator.