How To Find and Release Quarantined Messages in Office 365 Outlook

Introduction

If email being sent to your Office 365 account is not appearing in your inbox or SPAM folders even though the sender is using your correct Office 365 email address, this article will provide instructions to use the Message Quarantine tools to find and release messages to your inbox. 

Microsoft does not announce when it has quarantined an email message, so it is important to check your quarantine from time to time to make sure legitimate email messages are not being held in quarantine.

Microsoft has published instructions for accessing your message quarantine, and selecting incorrectly-categorized messages so that they may be marked “safe” from quarantine so that that they may be released and moved to your Inbox in Office 365.

Estimated Time to Complete

Reviewing this guide will take no more than 10 minutes.

Steps

1. Go to the Quarantine page, use https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine
2. On the Quarantine page, you can sort the results by clicking on an available column header.
   1. Click Customize columns to change the columns that are shown. (For example, 
      1. Time received
      2. Subject
      3. Sender
      4. Quarantine reason
      5. Recipient
   2. When you're finished, click Apply.
3. To filter the results, click Filter. Several filters, such as Sender Address, Recipient Address, and more are available in the Filters flyout menu that appears.
   1. When you're finished, click Apply. 
   2. Use Search box and a corresponding value to find specific messages. 
      1. Message ID
      2. Sender email address
      3. Recipient email address
      4. Subject. Use the entire subject of the message. The search is not case-sensitive.
   3. After you've entered the search criteria, press ENTER to filter the results.
4.  Select the message to view details and to take action on the message
5. To send a selected message to your Inbox, click Release Email.

Microsoft's detailed article can be found here: Find and Release Quarantined Messages as a User

Conclusion

Microsoft’s Office 365 email security aggressively scans for and seeks to remove what it considers to be threats to your account integrity, such as Phishing, SPAM, or otherwise malicious email messages and/or attachments. Using artificial intelligence algorithms, the Office 365 mail system will quarantine messages which it considers may be malicious. Please remember check your quarantine from time to time to make sure legitimate email messages are not being held in there.