What are the basic steps to try it out?
- Sign up for a free subscription, either here on the main website or find us on Microsoft Azure Marketplace (search for “Sperry Software”).
- A default rule is created for you in this process. The rule will cause a prompt to occur whenever you send an email outside your company.
- Install the add-in into Outlook using the instructions on Installing Safeguard Send for Microsoft 365.
- Send an email to say, a Gmail or Yahoo address to see the warning prompt.
After you decide you like the add-in and want to either create more rules or signup your entire company, you can unsubscribe from your free subscription and sign up for a new one at one of the paid tiers.
What are the differences between signing up through Microsoft Azure versus signing up for a subscription directly from the Safeguard Send for Microsoft 365 main page?
When you use Microsoft Azure to sign up for a subscription, you are billed through Microsoft Azure billing. You can manage your subscription from your Microsoft Azure Subscriptions page, including changing the number of users, changing your plan, or cancelling the subscription altogether. You can also do these same things through the use of the Safeguard Send for Microsoft 365 dashboard.
When you sign up for a subscription directly, Sperry Software bills you either through PayPal or we can invoice you directly. Direct invoicing is sometimes necessary if companies require that a quote/purchase order/invoice flow be sent for ongoing subscription payments. You can still navigate to the Safeguard Send for Microsoft 365 dashboard to change the number of users, change your plan, or cancelling the subscription altogether.
If you wish to be billed automatically by PayPal, you can simply sign up for any of the tiers from the Safeguard Send for Microsoft 365 main page (that is, Add To Cart, then complete the typical checkout purchase). If you wish to use direct invoicing, please email us at [email protected] with the subject “Quote Requested” and we can take it from there.
How does the add-in work? Does Sperry Software get access to the contents of the email, the recipients or the attachments?
No, we don’t send emails, recipients or attachments to our servers or anywhere. All processing takes place on the end user’s client Outlook (desktop or web).
This is possible because the way the add-in works is through the use of rules that are evaluated when you click send. The rules are fetched to the client rather than uploading your emails to a server for processing.
So now that you understand that all processing takes place locally, the one thing we DO do is to send the end user’s email address to our servers to be able to return the set of rules for that user (either individual or corporate wide rules).
This information is explained in more detail in our architecture whitepaper, which outlines the security apparatus around the add-in to ensure the safety of your email addresses and rules. Please get in touch with us for more detailed information.
How do I manage rules for an entire company instead of just me?
If you signed up for any paid tier, you can simply choose to edit the rules for an entire domain as instructed here.
Otherwise you first have to subscribe to a plan that offers this (either Standard or Pro). To do this, you can either choose to cancel/unsubscribe the current individual subscription then sign up for a paid tier using that same Microsoft 365 email address you used the free tier. Note that when you unsubscribe that all your information is deleted immediately so you might want to take screenshots of your settings if you want to recreate your rule(s) in your new subscription.
Alternatively, you can use a different email address (which must still be a Microsoft 365 email address) to sign up for any paid tier, as long as that different email address has the same domain that you want to create rules for.
What happens if two different IT admins from two different branches signup multiple users?
The 2nd IT admin to attempt to subscribe their domain will receive an error with the message “A subscription already exists for your domain.” To get in touch with the IT Admin that has already subscribed your company domain, please contact us at [email protected].
What happens if two different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) sign up the same company?
This is very similar to the above question where two IT managers sign up users in their respective branches. Basically, the 2nd CSP will not be allowed to continue. To resolve this problem, please contact [email protected] for help resolving this problem.
What happens if an individual existing user has already signed up, and then an IT Admin from the same company subscribes multiple users?
When an IT Admin signs up multiple users, the Safeguard Send dashboard creates a rule that applies to anyone from that domain. However, when the client side add-in goes to fetch a particular user’s rules, it first looks to see if there are rules for that particular user’s email address first. If there aren’t any, then it looks for that user’s domain based rules.
Knowing this, even if an IT admin signs up his entire company, that one individual existing user’s rules will still be fetched and used before the entire domain rule(s). In other words, nothing will happen to the existing user, and no rules that the IT Admin applies will take effect for the existing user. All other users will begin to see the IT Admin’s domain based rules.
To diagnose and fix this condition, you can reference the subscription Id found on any page of the dashboard, then compare the one from the individual user to the one the IT admin has. If they are different, then the individual user can unsubscribe/cancel their subscription. At that point, the IT Admin’s domain rule will begin to take effect.
Can two users from the same company sign up for individual subscriptions?
Yes, each user will have access to their own dashboards to control their own rules.
After we install it, we understand that new versions are not automatically pushed to us in order to avoid unexpected surprises when emailing. But when we are ready to upgrade, how do we do that? Also are there any release notes that describe when new features were added?
You can learn how to upgrade your version using this guide, and release notes are here.
What happens if something goes wrong during processing of the email?
By default, Outlook prevents the email from being sent if there are any problems reaching the add-in. However, this behavior can be changed to still allow the email to be sent by following the Microsoft provided instructions at On-send feature for Outlook add-ins – Office Add-ins | Microsoft Learn.