Recipient Guard — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 September 2026

Recipient Guard is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that warns you at send time when a recipient looks like it may have been chosen incorrectly (for example, picked from AutoComplete). It is provided by RecipientGuard Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 17168880). This policy explains what the add-in accesses and how that information is handled.

The short version

• There is no Recipient Guard server. The add-in has no backend of its own. It does not send your data to us or to any third party.
• All recipient analysis runs locally, inside Outlook, on your device.
• What it stores — your frequent contacts, your exceptions, and a few settings — is kept inside your own Microsoft 365 mailbox. The full list is below.

What the add-in accesses

• Recipients of the message you are composing (To, Cc, Bcc) and their email addresses and display names — read at send time to check for a likely wrong recipient.
• Your own email address — read from Outlook itself, to work out your organisation's domain so internal recipients aren't flagged as external. This comes from Outlook, not from Microsoft Graph.
• Your frequently-contacted people (Microsoft Graph People.Read) — the display names and email addresses of people you email often, used to recognise when a recipient differs from the address you normally use for that person. Only Smart detection uses Graph; the send-time check works without it.
• Your saved contacts (Microsoft Graph Contacts.Read) — the display names and email addresses in your Outlook Contacts folder, used for the same purpose. Microsoft’s frequently-contacted list is built from mail you have already sent, so it cannot include someone you have saved but not yet written to. This permission is optional and separate: if it is not granted, Smart detection works exactly as before, using your frequently-contacted people alone.

Smart detection normally starts when you switch it on, and Microsoft asks for your consent first. There is one exception worth knowing about: if your organisation's administrator has already granted that consent, the add-in may load your contact list automatically the first time you open its pane, without asking again — because the permission has already been given on your behalf. You can turn it off, and turning it off deletes the stored list.

The add-in requests People.Read and User.Read, and may additionally request Contacts.Read. People.Read and Contacts.Read are used to read data; User.Read is part of the sign-in request and the add-in makes no call with it. Contacts.Read is asked for on top of the other two, never instead of them, so refusing it leaves Smart detection working rather than switching it off. The sign-in screen also shows a line, "Maintain access to data you have given it access to" (offline_access), which Microsoft's authentication library adds automatically. It grants no additional data — it only avoids asking you to sign in again each time.

What is stored, and where

Everything below lives in Office roaming settings — storage Microsoft keeps inside your own mailbox. None of it leaves your Microsoft 365 environment, and there is no copy anywhere else. This is the complete list:

• A compact list of your frequent contacts (display name and email address), if Smart detection is on.
• Addresses and domains you mark as "Don't warn about this" — your exceptions list.
• Whether you have switched Smart detection off, so it stays off.
• Whether you have already been shown the one-off tip about Smart detection, so it isn't shown repeatedly.
• A short-lived marker, valid for two minutes, set when you choose "send anyway" from the review pane, so that send isn't stopped a second time.

The add-in keeps no logs and performs no analytics or tracking.

What is not done

• Message bodies and attachments are never read.
• No recipient data, contact data, or message content is transmitted to the developer or any third party.
• Your information is never sold, shared, or used for advertising.

One thing to be precise about: the add-in's Send feedback link puts a few technical details — your Outlook version, platform, and whether Smart detection is on — into the part of the link that browsers do not send to a web server, so our support page can show them to you. They reach us only if you choose to paste them into your email. No addresses and no message content are included.

Data controlled by Microsoft

The add-in runs inside Microsoft Outlook and uses Microsoft Graph and Office storage. Microsoft's handling of that data is governed by the Microsoft Privacy Statement. You can review or revoke the permissions you granted at myapps.microsoft.com.

Retention and removal

To delete everything, open the add-in's pane and use "Remove all Recipient Guard data from this mailbox" under Stored data. That removes your contact list, your exceptions, and the tip and short-lived markers, and it switches Smart detection off so it stays off. One setting is therefore kept rather than deleted — the record that Smart detection is off — because without it an organisation that has already granted consent would have the contact list quietly rebuilt the next time you opened the pane. The add-in tells you whether the removal actually succeeded rather than simply claiming it did.

To remove only the contact list and stop Smart detection, turning it off does that on its own and leaves your exceptions in place.

This matters because the data is held in your mailbox rather than on your device: removing the add-in stops it running, but should not be relied on to delete what is already stored, and neither should revoking consent. Revoking consent at myapps.microsoft.com ends the add-in's Graph permissions, so no further contacts can be read — it does not reach into your mailbox and remove the list it already has.

Individual exceptions can also be removed one at a time from the same pane. As the mailbox owner you can also clear this storage through your own Microsoft 365 administration, independently of the add-in.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@recipientguard.co.uk.