Email Safety Tips
At the beginning of some emails is a message that reads “You don't often get email from … Learn why this is important”. This is called a safety tip, and it is added to certain emails by Microsoft in order to raise your suspicions of a new sender’s email address.
The safety tip is shown to recipients in the following scenarios:
- The first time you get a message from a sender
- You don't often get messages from the sender
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is this safety tip showing up in my emails now?
This adds 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 malicious actor before you realize this may be a scam email, such as a gift card scam.
It may also be an email address that is legitimate, but it should at least make you double check the sender to ensure it is safe.
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 Office Outlook or Outlook.com.
The impersonation email addresses that are scams should also raise a safety tip to help you spot them easier. You should report impersonation emails by forwarding them to phishing@psu.edu. You can report unknown senders with suspicious attachments to phishing@psu.edu and we will let you know if the attachment is malicious.
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?
You can see here how to add the sender to your safe senders list or contacts in Outlook, and you will not see a safety tip for this sender.
4. Can you disable all safety tips for me?
No, safety tips cannot be disabled. If most emails you receive are from new senders, you can simply ignore the safety tip presented in an email.
5. Safety tips are filling up my email previews and preventing me from quickly scanning my messages. How can I still read the preview?
A first option is to increase your Outlook reading pane size 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. How can I report a suspicious email?
You can forward phishing and scam emails to phishing@psu.edu, or report the message as junk through Outlook.
For a detailed explanation of the differences between phishing and Unsolicited Business Email or SPAM messages please see Spam vs. Phishing: Definitions, Overview & Examples from the INFOSEC Institute.
To learn more on how to protect yourself from phishing, visit Microsoft's Guide to Phishing