Concerned about users accidentally emailing the wrong recipients?
Email has been a cornerstone of business communication. It serves as an official and legally acknowledged record of interactions and information.
However, the inadvertent transmission of sensitive data through misdirected emails can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.
In this post, we will show you how you can use an Outlook add-in called SendGuard to prevent users from emailing the wrong person.
What is SendGuard?
SendGuard for Microsoft 365 is an Outbound email security solution.
This powerful tool secures your emails, protects against data loss (DLP), prevents PII and GDPR mistakes, and avoids disclosing sensitive information, especially when sending emails to external domains.
It prompts users to think before they hit Send.
SendGuard for Microsoft 365 notifies you when emailing external domains, restricted addresses, and detects sensitive content.
Learn more about SendGuard:
SendGuard is now Microsoft 365 Certified
SendGuard’s Integration with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) Sensitivity Labels
How does SendGuard works?
SendGuard enables organizations to enhance their email security by requiring users to double-check and confirm external recipients before sending.
Along with this verification feature, users must review attachments within Outlook prior to sending emails.
To safeguard confidential data, companies can set specific parameters, such as an approved domains list, which triggers a warning when attempting to send an email to a non-approved domain.
Consider the following scenarios which can lead to email mistakes:
Outlook Autocomplete Errors
Imagine you’re working on an important project and need to send an update to your team lead. You start typing their name in the “To” field of your Outlook email. As you type, Outlook’s autocomplete feature suggests several contacts with similar names. In your haste, you click on the first suggestion without double-checking.
Unfortunately, the email goes to a different person with a similar name, who is not part of your project team. This mistake could lead to confusion, potential data breaches, or even embarrassment, especially if the email contains sensitive information.
Clicking “Send” Too Quickly
When you’re in a hurry, you may not pay enough attention to detail, quickly typing a recipient’s name without verifying that you’ve selected the correct person, especially if multiple contacts have similar names or email addresses. In your rush, you might also skim through the recipient list, failing to review the “To,” “Cc,” or “Bcc” fields, which can result in accidentally including or omitting the right people.
Misuse of “Reply All”
If you don’t carefully review the recipients, sensitive or irrelevant information meant for just one person can be shared with an entire group, leading to potential privacy breaches or confusion.
Here’s how SendGuard can help prevent such email mistakes from leading to serious security incidents:
Get users to review & confirm recipients and attachments in outgoing emails
The above prompt of SendGuard is called the SendConfirm screen. It prevents your team from sending emails to incorrect recipients, mis-attached files, avoiding client mix-ups and accidental autocomplete errors.
You may like: How to delay emails using SendGuard
Scan Emails for Sensitive Data
In SendGuard you can build DLP rules to scan the email content and attachments for sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), financial data and even profanity.
Prevent Reply allpocalypse
The ReplyGuard feature of SendGuard lets you view and confirm recipients any time you click Reply or Reply-to-All on an email with multiple recipients.
Encourage off-email resolution
SendGuard can be configured to display prompts to users to call or use Microsoft Teams to contact rather than using emails.
Create your own rules for specific security checks
Another robust feature of SendGuard is that it allows you to specify your own rules that will be run on outgoing emails using IF/THEN logic.
Some common rules which you can create are:
- Prompt for confirmation if the email contains sensitive information such as credit card number
- Prompt to BCC emails to the CRM system
- Do not send an email if it contains domains that should not be contacted at all
Prevent Email Mistakes from compromising your Business
For further information on how SendGuard can help your business to proactively mitigate Outlook autocomplete and other email mistakes, please visit our solution page or contact us.
You can also try a 30-day free trial to see how the addin works.
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