Many organizations wanting to proactively defend against phishing employ periodic audits against their members to increase awareness about the content of phishing emails and to increase report rates of legitimate phishing attempts to the proper channels. These campaigns involve sending “test” phishing emails to users' inboxes and expecting them to both not click on the links inside and, hopefully, to report them to the IT resources dedicated to tracking phishing.

If you are looking to keep a clean and tidy 100% report rate and to have the best kill rate for test phishing emails on your team then look no further than the email headers sent along with these tests.

The presence of these headers helps whatever service is sending these test phishing emails to recognize when one that is reported is part of a planned phishing test, and is not a legitimate phishing attempt. Outlook rules filtering on these headers can help you sort these emails into an appropriate folder to be reported at your convenience. Technology!