Is Microsoft 365 Quarantine Especially Unreliable Lately?
Asked by
MellowKite42
Has anyone else been having a particularly bad experience with the Microsoft 365 email quarantine recently? I'm seeing repeated errors, data that fails to load, very slow pages, and messages that sometimes need to be released or deleted multiple times before the action actually sticks.
Answers
Yes. For bulk work, we stopped relying on the portal and use Exchange Online PowerShell instead. Get-QuarantineMessage can find the messages, and Release-QuarantineMessage -ReleaseToAll can release them. It responds much faster and reports failures instead of silently pretending everything worked. Be aware that Get-QuarantineMessage returns only 100 results by default and tops out at 1,000 per page, so larger backlogs require looping through pages 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.
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I’ve noticed odd behavior for about a week. The summary window sometimes opens, closes, and then opens again, and on one day the page took an unusually long time to load. I haven’t seen every failure described here, but the portal has clearly been unstable.
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It has definitely seemed worse since the service outage earlier this week. Actions sometimes take a long time to complete, and released messages may not appear immediately even though they eventually go through.
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VelvetOrbit3: 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 generally much faster and clearer than fighting the increasingly awkward web interfaces.