Is anyone else having a particularly bad experience managing Microsoft 365 email quarantine? The portal is throwing repeated errors, failing to load results, taking a very long time to respond, and sometimes requiring the same messages to be released or deleted multiple times. In some cases, released messages also do not appear to be found immediately afterward.
3 Answers
I’ve noticed some odd behavior over the past week too. The summary window occasionally opens, closes, and then reopens, and one day the page took an extremely long time to load. I haven’t run into every problem you described, but the portal does seem unstable.
Yes. For bulk actions, we stopped relying on the portal and use Exchange Online PowerShell instead. `Get-QuarantineMessage` lets you find the messages, and `Release-QuarantineMessage -ReleaseToAll` releases them. It responds much faster and reports failures instead of silently appearing to do nothing. Just remember that `Get-QuarantineMessage` only returns 100 results by default and has a 1,000-result page limit, so larger backlogs require paging with `-Page` and `-PageSize 1000`. If the same senders keep getting quarantined, check the tenant allow/block configuration too—the underlying filtering issue may be creating most of the workload.
It has definitely been worse than normal this week, especially following the service outage earlier in the week. Messages sometimes do not show up as released right away, although they eventually seem to process.
I’ve moved a lot of repetitive Microsoft 365 administration into PowerShell for the same reason. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s much quicker and more predictable than some of the newer admin interfaces.