Recipient Guard — Support

Help with the Outlook add-in that warns you before sending to a likely wrong recipient.

Installing Recipient Guard

Recipient Guard has two parts, and which ones you get depends on how it is installed.

• Deployed by a Microsoft 365 administrator — the complete product. Recipients are checked automatically every time you select Send.
• Installed by an individual from the marketplace listing — the Recipient Guard pane is available to check a message's recipients on demand, but the automatic send-time check does not run.

This is a Microsoft platform rule, not a licensing restriction: Outlook only enables event-based activation — the feature that lets an add-in check a message as it is sent — for add-ins deployed by an administrator.

Deploying it (administrators)

This takes a few minutes. If you run your own Microsoft 365 tenant, you can deploy it to yourself the same way.

1. Sign in to admin.microsoft.com as a Global Administrator.
2. Go to Settings › Integrated apps.
3. Choose Get apps, search for Recipient Guard, and select Get it now.
4. Choose who receives it — Just me, specific users or groups, or the entire organisation.
5. If a permissions and capabilities summary is shown, review and accept it. Recipient Guard activates on the message-send event — this is what enables the send-time check. Depending on how the app is acquired, this screen may not appear.
6. Finish the deployment.

Recipient Guard asks for no Microsoft Graph permissions when it is deployed. Deploying it and granting it permission are two separate things, handled by two different parts of Microsoft 365 — which is why no permissions screen appears during deployment.

Optional: grant consent once for your whole organisation

Recipient Guard's Smart detection feature reads the signed-in user's frequently-contacted people, so it can recognise when a recipient differs from the address normally used for that person. By default each user is asked to approve that the first time they turn the feature on.

Administrators can approve it once for everyone instead, so no one in the organisation is ever prompted. Open this link, sign in with an administrator account, review the permissions and select Accept:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/adminconsent?client_id=7519a415-3e8b-4c8e-9599-740a658ae7a2

The permissions requested are read your relevant people list and sign you in and read your profile. Recipient Guard does not read message content, and no data is sent to us — see the Privacy Policy.

This step is optional. Without it the add-in works exactly the same; users are simply prompted individually the first time they turn Smart detection on. Each user still opens the Recipient Guard pane once to switch the feature on.

Deployment is not instant. It can take up to 24 hours to reach every mailbox, and users may need to restart Outlook before the send-time check starts working. The Recipient Guard pane usually appears sooner than the send-time check does — if the pane is there but sends are not being checked yet, the deployment is still propagating.

Feedback

Recipient Guard is free and built by one person, so there is no support desk quietly logging what goes wrong — if it gets something wrong, or misses something it should have caught, telling me is the only way I find out.

Email support@recipientguard.co.uk. The most useful things to include:

• Which Outlook you use — classic Windows, new Outlook, Outlook on the web, or Mac
• What you were doing, and what you expected to happen instead
• If a warning looked wrong, the reason it gave (for example “same display name” or “Outside your organisation”)

Please don't include real recipient addresses or message content — Recipient Guard is built so that information never leaves your mailbox, and an email to support would defeat that. A description is enough.

If Recipient Guard has been useful, a rating on Microsoft Marketplace genuinely helps other people find it.

Contact

Email support@recipientguard.co.uk and we'll get back to you. Please include your Outlook version (new Outlook on Windows, Outlook on the web, or classic Outlook) and a description of the issue.

Common questions

• How does it decide a recipient is wrong? It flags recipients outside your organisation, recipients that share a name or username with another recipient, and — with Smart detection on — recipients that differ from the address you usually use for that person.
• Smart detection isn't finding my contacts. Click Turn on smart detection and accept the one-time permission prompt. It needs a Microsoft 365 account with some existing contact history — on a new mailbox it can take up to about a day for Microsoft to build that list.
• The pane works, but my sends aren't being checked. The send-time check requires the add-in to be deployed by a Microsoft 365 administrator — see Installing Recipient Guard above. If it has just been deployed, allow up to 24 hours and restart Outlook.
• It flagged a recipient that was correct. Choose Send anyway, or use Don't warn about this address to stop flagging it in future.
• How do I turn Smart detection off? Open the Recipient Guard pane and choose Turn off smart detection and clear the stored contact list. That deletes the contact list from your mailbox and stops the history-based check; the external and look-alike checks keep working.
• How do I remove it? Remove the add-in from Outlook's add-in management. To revoke its permissions, visit myapps.microsoft.com. If you used Smart detection, turn it off first (above) so the stored contact list is cleared — it lives in your mailbox and is not deleted by uninstalling.

Privacy

Recipient Guard has no server and sends none of your data to us. See the Privacy Policy for details.

Recipient Guard is provided by RecipientGuard Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 17168880). · Privacy · Terms