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Inbound Email Security: AI-powered email security

Inbound email security uses generative AI to protect your organization from spam, phishing, and other malicious email. It is included with Paubox Email Suite Plus and Premium and requires no additional setup. When an email is quarantined, Paubox generates a short, readable explanation of why, so admins can quickly decide whether to release it, block it, or allow future emails from the sender.

How inbound email security works

Inbound email security doesn’t rely only on static rules or keyword filtering. It learns what normal email looks like for your organization and flags messages that don’t fit. It:

  • Analyzes tone and intent to see whether a message matches normal communication patterns
  • Evaluates sender behavior to detect spoofed addresses or suspicious sending patterns
  • Compares messages against historical patterns to identify anomalies
  • Adapts over time to new threats and to changes in your organization’s email traffic

When an email enters your domain, Paubox scans it before it reaches any inbox. The scan covers sender reputation, content, behavior and tone, attachments and links, and your ruleset. If the email meets the criteria for quarantine, it is held and classified as spam, graymail, phish, virus, virus (macro), or ExecProtect.

Quarantine reasons and confidence ratings

For each quarantined email, Paubox generates an AI-powered quarantine reason that summarizes the most relevant factors behind the decision. Reasons can include:

  • Block list matches
  • Suspicious or abnormal sender behavior
  • Indicators of spam or unwanted content
  • Phishing patterns, impersonation, or spoofing
  • Domain or identity anomalies
  • Suspicious intent or urgency
  • Threats detected in attachments or links

 

View the quarantine reason for a single email

  1. Log in to your Paubox dashboard
  2. Navigate to Inbound Security > Quarantine
  3. Click an email in the quarantine list
  4. Click View original message
  5. Click the Header tab

The quarantine reason appears at the top of the message header, after X-Paubox-Security:.

View quarantine reasons across many emails

The Statistics page is useful for spotting patterns across large sets of quarantined emails.

  1. Navigate to Inbound Security > Statistics
  2. Select your date range and domain filters
  3. Click the category you want to review: Spam, Gray, Phish, Virus, Virus (Macro), ExecProtect, or DLP
  4. Check the Reason column, which shows why each message was caught

Use message headers to investigate further

Below the quarantine reason, the message header contains technical details about how the email was sent and routed. Use it to verify the true sending domain, confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results, and see the routing path and sending servers.

Reduce false positives while the AI learns

Inbound email security learns as it sees more of your mail. You may see more legitimate messages in quarantine at first, and that volume drops as the AI learns what is normal for your organization. Keep an eye on your quarantine after any change to email filtering, and use these steps to help it learn:

  • Release and allow legitimate mail, which keeps future mail from that sender or domain out of quarantine
  • Set up allow rules for trusted senders
  • Check the quarantine reason to understand why a message was held
  • Set up quarantine reports so users can manage their own quarantined messages

Is my data safe?

Inbound email security is built with HIPAA compliance at its core, and patient data is never shared with third parties. For details, read the Paubox AI use policy.