Bitdefender Email Protection - Dangerous and Safe labels

TomH_NMB

I posted a question last year about the viability of removing (or making optional) the Bitdefender:Safe email label. I have Outlook and Gmail mboxes and removing the Safe label from 99.9% the emails is wasteful. Can Version 28 "fix" this?

Of note, one segment of the emails that are labeled Dangerous are the Bitdefender emails.

Thanks.

Tom

Alexandru_BD

Hello,

Yes, I know we discussed this topic before on the forum, and the developers' decision was to keep both labels.
And I'll give you a little insight here. There's also a technical aspect involved in this flow. The "Safe" label is not just for show, it's also used to ensure that the feature doesn't scan the same email multiple times. So it actually has a role in the background, apart from the obvious.

Now, regarding the detection from your screenshot, I assume this was one time only, yes? The newsletter is not usually flagged by Email Protection, correct?

I think I know what happened this time. One of the community members reported a possible malicious link in one of the discussions featured in that newsletter. The link was not clickable and basically harmless in plain text, but Email Protection still connected the dots and returned a "Dangerous" detection for that URL even in text only, because that domain already has a malware detection and is flagged on virustotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/overbridgenet.com
Therefore, Email Protection actually did its job well. 😅

The text has now been removed from the thread title. For the record, on the forum, we also have a policy regarding such content:

"Posting malware samples and /or URLs is not allowed in the community! Do not post direct links to any executable files, malicious/suspicious software or websites in threads, comments or private messages, even if you think the software or site is clean and incorrectly detected by Bitdefender. Should you wish to report a false positive / false negative detection, head to this link and submit your findings using the dedicated form."

I think the reasons behind this guideline are self-explanatory, we wish to avoid for anyone to click on possible malicious links and we try to enforce this policy through our moderation efforts. The community isn't a place to report/post harmful and possible malicious links, there's a dedicated procedure for that, but unfortunately not everyone reads the guidelines to find out what they're not allowed to post, and we occasionaly find ourselves in this scenario…

But anyway, I think this is a good example of how such links can affect other areas, namely a newsletter that can be detected as "Dangerous" when it's obvious that it isn't. I made that newsletter myself (not very fond of it since it doesn't look they way I wanted to, but I'm somewhat limited by the template here).

So, I think we sorted this.. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers