Missing emails? Exchange Online is tagging legitimate messages as spam - here's what to do

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• Legitimate emails successful Exchange Online are being tagged arsenic spam.
• A caller URL regularisation is quarantining emails arsenic phishing attempts.
• Microsoft has made immoderate advancement resolving the problem.

Those of you who usage Microsoft's Exchange Online arsenic your email work whitethorn find that important emails are failing to look successful your inbox. Late past week, the bundle elephantine acknowledged a occupation with the online mentation of Exchange, causing morganatic emails to beryllium quarantined arsenic spam.

In a work alert spotted by BleepingComputer, Microsoft revealed that the glitch started connected February 5 and has been preventing immoderate Exchange Online users from sending and receiving emails.

"Some users' morganatic email messages are being marked arsenic phish and quarantined successful Exchange Online," Microsoft said successful the work alert. "We've determined that the URLs associated with these email messages are incorrectly marked arsenic phish and quarantined successful Exchange Online owed to ever-evolving criteria aimed astatine identifying suspicious email messages, arsenic spam and phishing techniques person go much blase successful avoiding detection."

The institution pinned the blasted connected a caller URL regularisation that's incorrectly identifying immoderate morganatic URLs arsenic malicious. That glitch is triggering mendacious positives, wherever Exchange is tagging emails from those domains arsenic phishing attempts.

Microsoft has made immoderate advancement successful resolving the issue. At this point, immoderate users whitethorn spot antecedently quarantined emails commencement to look successful their inboxes. But different messages volition stay quarantined until the occupation is wholly fixed.

If you bash usage Exchange Online and are affected by this bug, you whitethorn privation to cheque your quarantined emails to spot if immoderate morganatic ones are waiting for you. To bash this, caput to the Quarantine page for Microsoft Defender and marque definite you're signed successful with your enactment oregon schoolhouse account. If you spot a connection that's legit, conscionable cheque it and click the Release fastener to escaped it from quarantine jail. Otherwise, you'll person to hold for Microsoft to afloat resoluteness the glitch, which hopefully won't instrumentality excessively overmuch longer.

Why would a occupation similar this occur? Blame it not conscionable connected Microsoft but connected today's blase breed of spammers and scammers. As junk emails and phishing attacks go much advanced, they get amended astatine evading detection. That means companies similar Microsoft person to continually tweak the rules designed to place and artifact them. In this case, Microsoft seemingly went a spot overboard.