Is there a way to see why an email is marked as dangerous?

Hi there,

When an email is marked as "dangerous", is there a way to find out why?

Also, is there any way to change the text and/or colour of the labels? On my phone the label takes up over half the title, and on Windows, the label is just annoying - a simple green tick would be better, e.g. like the one Bitdefender uses in a Google search:

Cheers!

John

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

Alexandru_BD

Hi,

Bitdefender’s Email Protection feature automatically scans incoming webmail for Gmail and Outlook and labels each new message as Safe (green) or Dangerous (red) based on its real-time threat analysis. Its backend scanning looks for common threat indicators such as malware or malicious attachments, phishing links or scam content, spam or high-risk reputation senders/URLs, unusual or forged sender information, and behavioral/heuristic signals that resemble common threats. So, there can be multiple reasons behind a flagged email and you won't know the reasons until opening the email (without clicking on any links or attachments there, of course). In any case, even if you do that, Bitdefender will block access to the dangerous page or attachment. Email Protection is more like a heads-up, it tells you if the communication you receive is clean or suspicious, but the actual antivirus will still protect you if some URL in your email attempts to redirect you to a harmful page.

These heuristics and threat intelligence feeds are similar to how enterprise email security engines work, by weighing IP/domain reputation, URLs, attachments and structural indicators, however Bitdefender does not expose the specific reason for each flag you see in Gmail or Outlook browsers. General third-party threat scanning systems operate this way, they produce a verdict but usually do not publish detailed internal scoring or rule hits to the end user. If you think something is wrongly flagged, you’d need to contact Bitdefender Support so researchers can look into it.

As for changing the label appearance, there is no setting in Bitdefender that lets you do that.
More information about Email Protection can be found here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/91168/

I hope the information is helpful.

Regards

All comments

Alexandru_BD

Hi,

As for changing the label appearance, there is no setting in Bitdefender that lets you do that.
More information about Email Protection can be found here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/91168/

I hope the information is helpful.

Regards

Alexandru_BD

"a simple green tick would be better" - I'm not sure if that would work in the email context. I mean, Traffic Light is an actual browser extension that flags dangerous links in your search results, so in this scenario a red or green checkmark is indeed sufficient, but if we are talking about email, I think these labels are necessary, otherwise a simple checkmark could go unnoticed.. it has to say explicitly if an email is Safe or Dangerous.

If the label feels too big on mobile, changing display scaling or font size on your phone may make it visually smaller, but Bitdefender doesn’t have any UI options to control label design..

johnnyBionic

Thanks for the responses Alexandru, much appreciated, and things make a bit more sense now 🙂