Think before you send: External email addresses to be flagged
To enhance data security, AU will use visual alerts to notify staff when emails are being sent to external recipients.
It’s easy to send an email to the wrong person by mistake. Often, no harm is done. But if the email contains sensitive information, sending it to the wrong recipient could result in a serious breach of data security.
The Danish Data Protection Agency requires universities and other institutions to put security measures in place to reduce the risk of inadvertently sending personal data to external recipients. For this reason, AU will now alert members of staff when they are about to send an email to somebody outside the university.
This security measure is designed to mitigate the risk of GDPR breaches when emails containing personal data are accidentally sent to external recipients – perhaps as the result of the auto-complete function in the email client.
When a member of staff types an external email address in the recipient field, a MailTip will appear, and the external email address will be displayed on a highlighted background.
You can see both alerts here:
These alerts are not visible to the email recipients and will not appear in your email correspondence.
Marking external email addresses in various ways is a common tool to enhance information security, and public institutions like the Danish Armed Forces and Aarhus Municipality, along with numerous private companies, employ similar measures.