Quarantine
The quarantine queue holds messages that MxGuard scored as suspicious but not clearly malicious — typically 0.75–0.97 on the spam scale. You decide what to do with each one.
Why messages are quarantined
Quarantine sits between clean and reject for messages where the system is suspicious but not certain. Common reasons:
- ML model scored 0.75+ on the message body content
- URLs in the body matched SURBL or Spamhaus DBL
- The sender's IP has no reverse DNS lookup
- The envelope-from localpart looks structurally random (gibberish heuristic)
- A combination of weaker signals added up
The Why column on each row tells you which signals fired.
Actions per message
| Action | What it does | Side effects |
|---|---|---|
| .eml | Downloads the raw .eml file | None — read-only |
| release | Delivers the message to the mailbox now | Adds a ham label; future mail from the same sender domain gets −0.30 for 30 days |
| delete | Drops the message permanently | No automatic spam label (we don't want to penalise random newsletters you weren't expecting) |
Marking spam vs deleting
If a message in quarantine is genuinely spam — not just unwanted — open the detail view and click Mark as spam instead of just deleting. This:
- Adds a spam label to the training corpus
- Boosts the sender domain's score in future
- Helps the next model retrain learn this pattern
Delete is fine for newsletters or unsolicited but not malicious mail — no need to penalise the sender.
Daily digest
Instead of checking the quarantine page constantly, enable the daily digest in Settings. You'll get a 7 a.m. email summary of overnight quarantines with one-click release/delete links for each message.
Retention
Quarantined messages are automatically deleted after 30 days by default. A daily cleanup job runs at 04:00 and removes anything older. If your operator has changed this setting, the retention period may differ.
The intent: if you haven't acted on a held message within a month, you probably weren't going to. The daily digest reminds you of held mail so nothing important falls through.