An additional layer of protection will provide a warning to the user in an email marked as suspicious, or reassurance if the message is Safe. The safety tip, when included, will be displayed in the messaging bar at top of the mail. And these will be color-coded indicating the categories either the message is Suspicious, Unknown Trusted or Safe. Four types of safety color tips which will be seen in the Outlook on the Web experience, while Outlook clients for desktop and mobile will display only the Red safety tip for suspicious emails. These safety tips will only be added when there are information users need. So most of the messages in the inbox will not have a safety tip. The details of the color-coded email safety tips are given below.
Color coded Email Safety Tips for Microsoft 365 users
Red safety tip – Messages marked Suspicious have a red safety tip. These are either known phishing messages, failed sender authentication, spoofing message suspect or some other criteria that Exchange Online Protection has used to determine that the message is fraudulent. Seeing this tip, one should not interact with such messages and should delete it. Yellow safety tip – A yellow bar at the top of the message indicates an Unknown safety level. It has been marked as unknown. This means Exchange Online Protection has marked the message as spam. If you think it’s not spam, one can click it’s not a spam link in the yellow bar to move the message to inbox from junk mail. Green safety tip – Messages from domains that are identified by Microsoft as being safe are considered Trusted and these kinds of messages display a green bar at top of messages. Gray Safety tip – Those emails which are not filtered for spam as they have already been considered safe by the user’s organization or it’s on the user’s safe senders list or the Exchange Online Protection though marked it a junk but the user moved it out of junk folder to inbox. Such types of messages are marked with a gray safety tip. The gray safety bar also appears when images within the message are disabled.
What criteria determines the type of safety tip?
Exchange Online protection being an industry-leading solution for securing emails, analyzes data patterns across millions of emails to identify spam, malware and phishing threats. Based on this Exchange Online Protection identifies suspicious messages and it applies the appropriate safety tip accordingly. Apart from this, users can also report messages for the Office team to analyze and further improve data patterns making the experience better. These Safety Tips in Exchange Online Protection will start rolling out to all users, over the coming weeks.
