Mail Guard

Outlook has a feature called auto-complete - it helps fill in the email address of those you want to send to. However, sometimes you may automatically accept what Outlook suggests as an email address - with the result that you may accidentally send a confidential email to the wrong recipient.

The Danish Data Protection Agency is understandably not pleased about this, and they actually suggest turning off auto-complete entirely, which is however a rather drastic decision.

Mail Guard from DPG is a server-side service that prevents you from accidentally sending email to people outside your organization, for example because Outlook has "helped" fill in the email address for you. To avoid having addresses of frequently used partners outside the organization approved every time, Mail Guard includes the ability to create a list of people or organizations that are pre-approved by your organization - a so-called 'whitelist'.

Read more about DPG Mail Guard here: DPG website.

DPG Outlook Office Addin supports Mail Guard in the following way:

1. Create a new email where at least one of the recipients is not part of your organization.

   

2. Open DPG Addin:

   

   Notice that in the Secure mail tab, Mail Guard icons are displayed for each recipient. The shield with the red cross means that the email to that recipient will be rejected by Mail Guard when you send the email. When you hover over each Mail Guard icon, you can see more details.

   If the icon is a shield with a red cross, you must click on it to approve it in Mail Guard if you are sure it is the correct recipient. The icon will change to a shield with a green checkmark.

   If there are many recipients that will not be approved by Mail Guard, you can select the More actions button:

   

   Select Approve all email addresses to remove all the red icons at once.

   It is also possible to select Remove all TLS email addresses.

You can now send the email to the approved recipients.

If you choose to send the email using the Send button in the email, even though there are unapproved recipients among them, DPG Addin displays the following message:

You can now choose:

• Send anyway: This sends the email bypassing Mail Guard and bypassing DPG entirely - which is not recommended. This button is automatically inserted by Microsoft.
• Open DPG Addin: This opens DPG Addin where you can make approvals or remove recipients as described above. This will typically be the button you should select.
• Don't send: Closes the message without sending the email. This button is automatically inserted by Microsoft.