In today's highly pressured work environments, it really is all too easy to enter the wrong email recipients or accidentally select 'Reply All' when sending a message. At a personal level, it may lead to some grovelling, but in a business environment it could prove potentially catastrophic
Microsoft Outlook's auto-complete feature is a great time saver, but, if you aren't paying attention, it's easy to pick the wrong recipient from the list presented. Even worse, if an attachment contains confidential information, your company could be violating GDPR compliancy and facing a punitive fine.
VIPRE's SafeSend avoids all these email-related disasters, as it forces Outlook users to confirm external recipients before allowing messages to be sent. It goes much further, as, along with sophisticated message controls, it provides DLP (data leak prevention) services that scan emails and attachments for sensitive information and ask for confirmation, if triggered by their content.
No version of Outlook is beyond its reach, as SafeSend supports all Windows desktop versions from 2007 onwards, along with Outlook 365 and OWA. It's a cinch to deploy, as the small add-in can be installed manually or distributed and managed centrally via GPO (Group Policy Object).
For testing, we chose central management and created a GPO to automatically install the SafeSend MSI package to our Active Directory (AD) authenticated users. We used Windows 10 desktops with Outlook installed and, as soon as they had logged back on to the domain, the add-on was silently pushed out to them.
The first thing SafeSend does when Outlook is next loaded is to confirm your internal email domain. Initially, it treats all other email domains as external and loads a pop-up confirmation message when emails are about to be sent to them.
When you send a message, SafeSend holds the email and its window lists all external recipients and attachments with checkboxes next to them. Just tick those you really want to send the message to and SafeSend then releases it.
For central management, SafeSend provides ADMX/ADML files for deployment in your domain controller's PolicyDefinations folder. With a SafeSend GPO created for all authenticated users, we could edit any setting and all changes were pushed to the local client registry policy section.
The levels of control are impressive, as the SafeSend GPO offers over 150 options. These include adding extra safe domains, limiting the number of message recipients, adding a custom footer, detecting bulk emails and classing embedded images as attachments.
You can verify that clients have SafeSend installed by setting it to add an X-header and using an Exchange transport rule to block emails that don't have this. SafeSend also works with many third-party email encryption products and can be set to ask users if they want the message encrypted. SafeSend's DLP uses policies to scan the email subject, content and attachments, and look for keywords and patterns.
The policy syntax is extremely versatile and can be set to inform the user when a match is found, ask for confirmation or deny the request.
Multiple DLP rules are added to the GPO content scanning section and can comprise anything from a string, a social security or credit card number, NHS ID or just about any PII you want to protect. We tested with a range of rules to scan attachments and, when one was triggered, SafeSend advised us of the reason, showed the attachment and also offered an option to open it.
SafeSend is the perfect solution for businesses worried about Outlook email security and data breaches. Remarkably easy to deploy and manage, it provides an invaluable defence against email blunders, teamed up with highly flexible DLP services.
Product: VIPRE SafeSend
Supplier: VIPRE
Web site: https://global.VIPRE.com
Contact: uksales@VIPRE.com
Phone: +44 (0) 800 093 2580
