Advanced Email Threat Protection

Information Technology (IT) offers Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to help protect you from phishing attempts and malware through a variety of features, such as a Spam Quarantine and URL Protection. Microsoft's spam filter uses confidence levels to determine whether an email should be marked as junk/spam or potentially malicious. When an email is identified as potentially unwanted or malicious, it will be directed to your Junk folder or to quarantine.

URL Protection

URL Protection aims to protect users from malicious or suspicious links delivered via email. If a URL is identified as suspicious or malicious, you will receive a warning when you click the URL. While you are able to continue to the page, it is strongly recommended that you adhere to the warning and do not proceed.

If you are interested in learning more about URL Protection, including the types of warnings provided, please review Microsoft's documentation on Office 365 ATP Safe Links.

Junk Email Folder

Any emails identified as potentially unwanted (e.g., marketing materials, sales pitches, etc.) will be directed to your Junk folder. Your junk folder may be viewed in either your email client (in your inbox as the "Junk" folder) or via Outlook Web Access at email.elon.edu (in your inbox as the "Junk" folder).

IT recommends regularly reviewing this folder and adding wanted senders to your safe senders list.

Spam Quarantine

Office 365 users receive spam notification messages from quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com. These emails are not junk/spam/phishing attempts and are sent approximately once every 24 hours. These messages are designed to show you email quarantined by Microsoft as spam. This documentation outlines the email and available actions.

Any emails identified as potentially malicious (e.g., phishing attempts) will be sent to quarantine. You will receive notification of any messages sent to quarantine once every 24 hours.

If you do not receive a quarantine email, that means you have not received any emails that Microsoft has flagged as potentially malicious.

What does the spam notification email look like?

What can I do?

You have two available actions within the email:

1. Release to Inbox - Releases the email to your inbox.
2. Report as Not Junk - Clicking this link sends a copy of the message to Microsoft for analysis. The spam team evaluates and analyzes the message, and, depending on the results of the analysis, adjusts the anti-spam filter rules to allow the message through.

How can I mark the sender as safe?

Read Microsoft's documentation on how to add email addresses to your safe senders list.

This is done by logging into your email online at email.elon.edu and then navigating to Settings -> View Outlook Settings -> Mail-> Junk email-> Safe Senders and Domains.

What if I don't do anything?

After a certain amount of time predetermined by Microsoft, emails in the spam notification quarantine will be deleted by Microsoft.

Online Management of Spam

Protection.office.com allows you to manually review your quarantined items.

1.) To get started, login at https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine

2.) This will show you all items in your quarantine folder:

There are two actions you can take:

1. Release - Releases the email to your inbox.
2. Release & report - Releases the email to your inbox and reports the message to Microsoft as not junk.