#businessowner
In today’s digital landscape, email remains a critical communication tool for businesses. However, with the increasing volume of email traffic, the risk of encountering malicious emails has also surged. To combat this, Microsoft 365 offers a robust feature known as Email Quarantine.
This guide to help business owners understand Email Quarantine and how it improves the security and efficiency of their email communications.
What is Email Quarantine?
Email Quarantine is a security feature in Microsoft 365 designed to protect your organization from potentially harmful emails. When an email is flagged as suspicious or potentially dangerous, it is moved to a quarantine area instead of being delivered to the recipient’s inbox. This allows for a review process to determine whether the email is safe or should be blocked.
Why Emails are Flagged as Suspicious or Dangerous
9 Reasons Emails can be flagged as suspicious or potentially dangerous:
- Phishing Attempts: Emails that try to trick recipients into providing sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card numbers, often by pretending to be from a legitimate source.
- Malware Attachments: Emails containing attachments that may include viruses, trojans, or other malicious software designed to harm or exploit the recipient’s system.
- Suspicious Links: Emails with links that lead to malicious websites or phishing pages. These links may appear legitimate but redirect to harmful sites.
- Unusual Sender Behaviour: Emails from senders with a history of sending spam or from newly created email addresses that haven’t established a reputation.
- High Spam Score: Emails that contain characteristics commonly associated with spam, such as excessive use of certain keywords, poor grammar, or suspicious formatting.
- Impersonation: Emails that attempt to impersonate a trusted entity, such as a bank or a colleague, often using similar-looking email addresses or spoofed domains.
- Bulk Sending: Emails sent in large volumes within a short period, which is typical behaviour for spam campaigns.
- Unusual Attachments: Emails with uncommon file types or attachments that are often used to deliver malware, such as .exe, .zip, or .scr files.
- Content Analysis: Emails with content that matches known patterns of malicious or spammy emails, identified through machine learning and heuristic analysis.
Why is Email Quarantine Important?
Email Quarantine enhances security, improves productivity and enhances compliance:
- Enhanced Security: Email Quarantine helps protect your business from cyber threats by isolating suspicious emails. This reduces the risk of data breaches, financial loss, and damage to your company’s reputation.
- Improved Productivity: By filtering out spam and malicious emails, Email Quarantine helps ensure that employees can focus on legitimate communications, improving overall productivity.
- Compliance: Many industries have strict regulations regarding data security. Using Email Quarantine helps businesses comply with these regulations by providing an additional layer of email security.
How Email Quarantine Benefits End Users
- Protection from Threats: End users are shielded from many cyber threats using email as a delivery mechanism. This reduces the risk of falling victim to phishing attacks or malware.
- Reduced Inbox Clutter: By quarantining spam and junk emails, users can focus on more important communications.
- User Empowerment: We educate users about Email Threats. Email Quarantine empowers them to recognize and report suspicious emails, contributing to the overall security of the organization.
Best Practices for Business Owners
- Educate Your Employees: Ensure that your employees understand the importance of email security and how Email Quarantine works. Encourage your staff to view Email Quarantine as a valuable tool, it’s not designed to hinder or annoy.
- Encourage Reporting: Create a culture where employees feel comfortable reporting suspicious emails. This will help improve the accuracy of the quarantine system and enhance overall security. Outlook includes built in tools to facilitate reporting an email as junk or phishing.
- Regular Communication: We will help you keep your employees informed about changes or updates to your email security policies. Clear communication helps reduce confusion and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
Enhancing the End User Experience
- Clear Communication: We will help you inform end users about the purpose and benefits of Email Quarantine. Clear communication helps users understand why certain emails are quarantined and reduces confusion.
- User Training: We can assist with regular training and simulated phish or spam email campaigns to educate users on recognising phishing attempts and other email threats complete with reporting. We can also provide guidelines on what to do if they suspect an email is malicious.
- Feedback Mechanism: Users can report false positives (legitimate emails that were quarantined) and false negatives (malicious emails that were not quarantined). These tools are built into Outlook, and they help improve the accuracy of the quarantine system.
Working with Your IT Admin
While this guide focuses on the business owner’s perspective, it’s important to note that your IT admin plays a crucial role in managing Email Quarantine. Your IT admin can work with you to establish Quarantine Policies and threat policies tailored to your business needs. This collaboration ensures that your email security measures are both effective and aligned with your organization’s goals.
Common Challenges and Solutions
The default notification period for spam and quarantine notifications is still daily however this can be reduced to every 4 hours and you can (and should) bookmark and visit https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine anytime to check if an expected email has been quarantined, you don’t have to wait for the email notification.
3 Quarantine Challenges and solutions:
- False Positives: Sometimes legitimate emails may be quarantined. To minimize this, regularly review and adjust your spam and phishing policies. Use the “Allow” list to ensure trusted senders are not mistakenly quarantined.
- User Awareness: Employees may not always recognize the importance of email quarantine. Staff sometimes need to be reminded about the latest email threats and best practices for email security so we will make a regular newsletter available to your business which embodies security awareness. You can pass this to your staff or ask them to sign up for the newsletter. If you want us to sign them up then please contact us to discuss.
- Policy Management: We can adjust quarantine policies over time to cater for current threats and changes in your organisation.
Conclusion
Email Quarantine in Microsoft 365 is a powerful tool which enhances email security. By understanding how it works and implementing best practices for managing quarantined emails, we can help protect your business from email-based threats and ensure smooth and secure communication. Regular monitoring, user training, and policy updates are key to maintaining an effective email quarantine system. We recommend all businesses embrace these practices to safeguard data integrity and stay ahead of potential threats.
