First Contact Safety Tip

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#email-automation #first-contact-safety-tip #microsoft-outlook #office-365

If you have Office 365 email, chances are you or your email admin have turned on the First Contact Safety Tip system. This is the system that automatically adds a warning to emails from senders you don’t normally get emails from, saying “You don’t often get email from…”

Abstract teal mosaic background with text overlay reading: Quick Hit: First Contact Safety Tip Rule

If you have Office 365 email, chances are you or your email admin have turned on the First Contact Safety Tip system. This is the system that automatically adds a warning to emails from senders you don’t normally get emails from, saying “You don’t often get email from…”

Email notification banner stating: "You don't often get email from upgrade_notifications@email.apple.com. Learn why this is important" with "Learn why this is important" appearing as a blue hyperlink.

For those of us who like to automate things, this also puts something in the email headers. Specifically, under the X-Forefront-Antispam-Report header, it adds a SFTY:9.25 tag.

X-Forefront-Antispam-Report: CIP:17.23.6.29;CTRY:US;LANG:en;SCL:1;SRV:;IPV:NLI;SFV:NSPM;H:[redacted];PTR:[redacted];CAT:NONE;SFTY:9.25;SFS:(13230040)(5073199012)(69100299015)(12012899012)(4076899003)(8096899003);DIR:INB;SFTY:9.25;

There’s good and bad news to this. The good news is that we can create an Outlook rule on our client email to filter out these emails to a separate folder. The bad news is that the separate folder can’t be the “Other” inbox if you have Focused/Other inboxes enabled.

Screenshot of Outlook rules configuration window showing a rule titled "Move First Contact emails to Inbox - New Senders" with condition "Message header includes SFTY:9.25" and action "Move to Inbox - First Contact". The rule has "Stop processing more rules" enabled and "Run rule now" unchecked. Window displays explanation text: "You can create rules that tell Outlook how to handle incoming email messages. You choose both the conditions that trigger a rule and the actions the rule will take. Rules will run in the order shown in the list below, starting with the rule at the top." User name "Edward Jensen" is visible.

Add the “Message header includes” condition and set the value to SFTY:9.25, and then select the folder you want to move the emails to. I’ve created a separate Inbox – First Contact folder. (Just remember to check that one periodically!)

This is obviously a bodge job to get around a limitation of Outlook. Hopefully, in the future, they’ll allow us to send emails to the Other inbox as a destination rule.