Microsoft Defender Email Security Benchmarking: Key Insights From One Year of Data
Microsoft, Monday, June 15th, 2026
Microsoft shares a year of data showing Defender for Office 365 outperforms competing email security solutions.
This Microsoft Security blog post analyzes a year of email security performance data comparing Microsoft Defender against secure email gateway and integrated cloud email security vendors. It reports Defender missed 59% fewer high-severity threats than the next-closest competitor in pre-delivery detection.
The data shows ICES vendors add only marginal malicious and spam filtering gains, while Defender's post-delivery remediation contribution grew from 45% to 96%. Microsoft attributes the improvements to native filtering, AI-powered grading, and Security Copilot integration.