First Contact Safety Tips

You may notice at the beginning of your emails, a message that reads “You don't often get email from … This is called a safety tip, and it is added by Microsoft in order to raise your suspicions or awareness of a new sender’s (or non frequent) email address. Basically, you will see this safety tip when it is the first time you get a message from a sender or you don't often get messages from the sender.

To help you understand more about the safety tip, we have answered the questions below.

1. Why is this safety tip showing up in my emails now?This is showing now, because we have implemented an new security feature for the University. Its purpose is to add an extra layer of security protection against potential impersonation attacks. 

If you receive an email from a new email address trying to impersonate someone you know, you may glance over the name and not notice that this is email address is pretending to be a person familiar to you. This could then lead to you communicating with the bad actor before you realize this may be scam.

2. When will I see safety tips?Any first contact from a new and unfamiliar email address will likely lead to a safety tip. The email could be legitimate or malicious. This includes marketing emails, spam emails, or any unsolicited bulk emails. These emails are harmless, but if you would like to report them, you can use the report message option in Microsoft Outlook. If you receive a an impersonation email please notify IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk  

3. I received a safety tip for a legitimate email from someone I know. Can you make the safety tip go away for this safe sender?Please see above or click the link: add the sender to your safe senders list  to add the email address to your safe senders list and you will no more see a safety tip for this sender. 

4. Can you disable all safety tips for me?No, safety tips cannot be disabled for any individual user.

5. Safety tips are filling up my email previews and preventing me from quickly scanning my messages. How can I still read the preview?One option is to increase your Outlook reading pane size so you are able to read the text after the safety tip. To change the size of the reading pane, rest the mouse pointer on the border between the reading pane and the message list, and then drag the border to right or left. This will increase the space used by the reading pane, and thus show more text from the body of the email.

You can also decrease the font size under settings or preferences to show more text that comes after the safety tip. Depending on your version of Outlook, you may also be able to increase the number of lines in the email preview. To see more options on how to configure the email preview reading pane, click here. This will provide more options for Outlook. Other mail applications will have similar options for customizing the message list preview.

6. Why am I seeing this safety tip and a warning banner?The warning banner will soon be removed. The safety tip, which is more modern and more intelligent will remain. Approvals to remove the external email warning banner are being obtained after which the warning banner will be removed.

6. I can see some other safety tips, what are they?Apart from the first contact safety tip, there are also other security tips provided by Microsoft to help protect and alert users about suspicious or unusual mails.

Some safety tips you may see while using email are:

First contact safety tip: This tip is shown to recipients when they first receive a message from the sender, or they don't regularly receive messages from the sender.

User impersonation safety tip: This tip is shown to recipients in messages where the sender's email address is included in user impersonation protection.Tip text: "This sender appears to be similar to someone who previously sent you email, but may not be that person."

Domain impersonation safety tip: This tip is shown to recipients in messages where the sender's email domain is included in domain impersonation protection.Tip text: "This sender might be impersonating a domain that's associated with your organization."

Unusual characters safety tip: This tip is shown to recipients in messages where the sender's name or email address contains characters that aren't typically used together (for example, a mix of mathematical symbols and plain text or a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters).Example tip: The email address MARY@CoNTᴏSO.CᴏM includes unexpected letters or numbers. We recommend you don't interact with this message.