Exchange Online saves your Office 365 inbox

How Exchange Online saves your Office 365 inbox

June 5th, 2017

Intech Systems

Office 365

The spam and malware attacks are increasing. Sometimes, they are so well-crafted that you may easily get deceived and consider them to be trustworthy. So, just putting them in Junk Mail is not going to save you from potential disaster.
Exchange Online Protection in Office 365 comes with an additional layer of protection for all users. This provides a warning to you in an email that is marked suspicious, or a reassurance when a message is safe.
When a message includes a safety tip, the tip will be displayed in a messaging bar at the top of the email. This bar may be in one of four color-coded categories indicating that the message is either Suspicious, Unknown, Trusted or Safe.

Suspicious Messages

Have a red safety tip and are either:

a known phishing message,
have failed sender authentication,
a suspected spoofing message or
have met some other criteria that Exchange Online Protection has used to determine the message is fraudulent.

You should not interact with suspicious messages and instead should delete them.

Spam Messages

Have a yellow bar at the top of the message. This indicates an Unknown safety level. You can click the ‘It’s not spam’ link in the yellow bar of a junk mail item to move the message to your inbox.

Trusted Messages

Displays a green bar at the top of the message. This indicates that the message is from a Trusted sender and are from the domains identified by Microsoft as being safe.

Safe messages

When the message is marked with grey bar, it means the email was not filtered for spam because it is:

either considered Safe by the user’s organization,
on the user’s safe senders list or
Exchange Online Protection marked the message as junk but the user moved it out of the junk folder to the inbox.

The grey safety bar also appears when images within the message have been disabled.

Outlook on the web experience includes all four types of Safety Tips. Outlook clients, whether desktop or mobile, will display only the Suspicious safety tip. Most messages in your inbox will not have a safety tip since Microsoft only adds them when they have information users need.

How Exchange Online does it?

Exchange Online Protection analyzes data patterns across millions of emails to identify spam, malware and phishing threats. Based on this ongoing analysis, Exchange Online Protection is able to identify suspicious messages and apply the appropriate Safety Tip. Furthermore, you can also report misclassified messages back for analysis.
In conclusion, safety tips are an important tool in combating phishing scams and online fraud. With this new functionality, Office 365 automatically provides an additional layer of protection for all its users.
This post was originally published by Microsoft in Office Blogs and has been updated with minor edits for accuracy and comprehensiveness.