Default Retention Period for Quarantined Email Messages
Question
You are the IT administrator of a company with a Microsoft 365 subscription and Microsoft Defender Plan 2 licenses.
During your summer holiday an email you were expecting did not arrive in your inbox.
You suspect it has been put in quarantine.
When you return to the office you open the quarantine page, but you cannot find the expected email.
How long are spam, phishing and bulk email messages quarantined by anti-spam policies retained by default before they are deleted?
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.Correct Answer: D
Spam, Phishing and Bulk messages quarantined by anti-spam policies will be retained for 30 days before being deleted.
This is the default and maximum value.Option A is incorrect.
Not the default value, but you can manually reduce the number of days to 10.
Option B is incorrect.
Not the default value, but you can manually reduce the number of days to 15.
Option C is incorrect.
Not the default value.
Maximum retention period is 30 days.
In Microsoft 365, anti-spam policies can be used to quarantine messages that are identified as spam, phishing, or bulk emails. By default, these messages are retained in quarantine for a period of time before they are automatically deleted. The length of time that messages are retained depends on the configuration of the anti-spam policy.
The default retention period for messages in quarantine is 15 days. This means that any message that is quarantined due to an anti-spam policy will be held in quarantine for 15 days, after which it will be automatically deleted.
It is possible for an administrator to modify the retention period for quarantined messages by adjusting the configuration of the anti-spam policy. For example, an administrator might choose to extend the retention period to allow for a longer review period or to comply with regulatory requirements.
In the scenario described in the question, the missing email may have been quarantined due to an anti-spam policy, but it is not possible to determine this without additional information. If the email was quarantined, it would have been retained in quarantine for up to 15 days before being automatically deleted. However, if the retention period for the anti-spam policy had been modified by the administrator, the message may have been retained for a longer period of time.
