Think of the quarantine as a secure holding pen for your organisation's email. Every day, your network is bombarded with messages, and while most of the dangerous ones are rejected outright, some sit in a grey area. They might be aggressive marketing newsletters, or they might be clever phishing attempts.
Instead of guessing and potentially deleting a legitimate email from an important client, MailShield places these suspicious messages into quarantine. This keeps your inbox clean while ensuring you never lose a vital piece of communication.
How emails are scored
Every email that arrives at your gateway passes through a series of security checks. These checks look at the sender's reputation, the links inside the email, and the actual words used in the message.
Based on these checks, the email is given a 'spam score'. If the score is low, the email goes straight to your inbox. If the score is incredibly high—such as an email containing a known computer virus—it is destroyed immediately. However, if the score falls somewhere in the middle and breaches your organisation's spam threshold, it is diverted to the quarantine vault.
Reviewing your held mail
You do not need to worry about accidentally opening a virus while checking your held messages. The MailShield portal allows you to safely preview the details of a quarantined email without actually downloading the dangerous contents to your computer.
When you view your quarantine list, you will see the sender's address, the subject line, the date it arrived, and the specific reason it was held.
Taking action
When you spot an email in your quarantine, you have two main choices:
- Release: If you recognise the sender and know the email is safe, clicking this will instantly deliver the message to your normal email inbox so you can read and reply to it as usual.
- Delete: If you confirm the message is indeed junk or a scam, you can manually delete it from the vault.
You do not have to clean it manually
If you are worried about your quarantine filling up with thousands of junk emails, do not be. MailShield is designed to be low-maintenance. Any email left sitting in your quarantine will automatically expire and be permanently deleted after a set period (typically seven days). You only ever need to visit the quarantine if you are actively looking for an email that you were expecting but has not arrived in your inbox.