Microsoft Defender SmartScreen error in Windows 10 edge

This topic has come up many times and I don’t know what Microsoft’s issue is. The best advice is to report that the URL is safe. I wish I could figure out what Microsoft’s issue is, but I’ve tried many things with no luck.

Hi Thomas.
Sorry forgot to come back to this request for help.

In summary my experience has been.
1) I did not know how to ‘report it to Microsoft’. My site host also recommended reporting it to Microsoft and gave me some tips on how to do it.
Eventually I found two ways – the most useful seems to have been via their windows 10 ‘Feedback hub’. However, I STILL have not got any replies from Microsoft. But the ‘feedback hub’ gave me the opportunity to report it and to make ‘replies’ as things changed.
2) I got two random variations in the way this error displayed – the big red box (where the pdf should have displayed) and a popup window. The popup window allowed me to ‘report the url as safe or unsafe’. So, I reported it as ‘safe’ each and every time I got that variation.
3) gradually over time (a couple of weeks) the problem went away – I had about 150 newsletter posts affected. Now they are all good.
4) Coincidence or not?
a) I built a new website as a subdomain. This involved the reuploading all my newsletters and using your plugin to display them. There are a few other pages also. SO now I had two sites with my newsletters available to the public. The ‘old’ newsletter site used a different plugin to display the pdf. There were no issues with either site during this time.
b) I then needed to redirect my main url to the content of this new subdomain. This required the “migration” of my main url site to new subdomain and the new newsletter subdomain site to my main URL folder (this meant the old subdomain was deleted during the migration). Immediately the new main URL site had the problem with my newsletter pages – the ‘few’ other pages were all ok. One test showed that if I reverted a newsletter page to use my ‘previous’ pdf display plugin instead of yours then the problem went away – hence my report to you. As a short-term fix I used this configuration to get my site back up. But I could not display any of my historical newsletters.
c) then one day (after reporting to Microsoft as above) I noticed a few of my historical newsletters were no longer having the problem when using your plugin. Progressively over a week or so I no longer had any problems with any of my newsletters being displayed. I am now only using your plugin.

So, my problem has just ‘disappeared” without any apparent reason. Without any feedback from Microsoft, I have no idea if they took any corrective action or not.

I can confirm that the problem occurs if you add the PDF files while the site is on a subdomain during development and you change the site domain later on. The PDF files will be loaded by the subdomain and this seems to cause the MS Defender warning in Edge browser.

Hi,

I am getting this error and have reloaded my pdf files onto the live server.

Any idea on next step to debug this?

Thanks

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by fullej.

I think I have to rebuild the plugin to fix Microsoft’s issue, but it’s next to impossible to test so even if I did that, I don’t know that it’d be any better.

For now, the best advice is to report that the URL is safe.