Under the Messages tab in the main MailShark Filtering console, there exists:

  1. Full message list = all emails in the last 30 days
  2. Quarantine = all quarantined emails in the last 30 days
  3. Archive = all stored emails from 60 to 90 days old


When the MailShark environment first went live, it was designed to:

  • store and quarantine spam messages (not delivered to recipient email address)
  • not store and forward clean messages (delivered to recipient email address)


This is how many Email filtering systems in the world work.


As a result of the original design:

  • the Full message list contained all messages passing through MailShark ie. Clean, "Low spam score", "High spam score" but NOT storing message content
  • Quarantine contained only emails that were above the "Low spam score" and "High score spam" values, storing message content
  • Archive contained emails rolled over from 30 day to Archive database, rolling over anything from Full message list or Quarantine


Over time, the MailShark team decided it could provide a better user experience and service if it enabled the storing of all headers and message content passing throughout the system.


This allowed for all messages to be indexed and searchable by MailShark customers, providing a level of service unmatched by any other Cloud based Email Filtering system in the world.


This is why under default configuration you see clean messages in quarantine as overall, it acts like a 90 day archive of all emails passing through MailShark for a domain.