Search quarantined messages

Use Advanced Search to find and filter messages in any quarantine list.

Search criteria

In Advanced Search, the following search criteria are available:

From: The sender. Supports partial strings. Not case sensitive.
To: The recipient. Supports partial strings. Not case sensitive.

Note

In the M365 quarantine list, From and To searches use the email header addresses, not the SMTP envelope sender or recipient addresses.
Subject: Supports partial strings. Not case sensitive.
Message size: Finds emails smaller or larger than a megabyte (MB) value. This uses the MIME size of an email, which may be greater than the raw file size. See Calculating email attachment file sizes.
Attachment: The type of attachment. Supports partial strings.
Note
- When we analyze senders and recipients of messages, we use their SMTP envelope sender and recipient addresses, not their from-header and to-header addresses.
- Special characters, including punctuation marks such as periods (.), commas (,), and hash symbols (#), as well as symbols, accent marks, ASCII control characters, and formatting characters, are ignored in the search criteria fields.

You can combine different search criteria. When you use multiple search criteria, a message must match all criteria using a logical AND operator.

You can filter messages by Direction, Status, or Reason.

If you change the date range or filter the messages, click the Refresh icon to update the search results.

The search criteria you select appear in the search box.

To modify a search, click the gray cross icon next to a criterion to remove it. Search results update immediately.

You can click the direction arrows to filter results for inbound or outbound messages:

Search results update immediately when you select a direction filter.

There's no indication of email direction in the Post delivery quarantine and M365 quarantine lists because all the messages are inbound.