Wrong Recipients Detection: Overview

Wrong Recipients Detection catches an email that's about to go to the wrong person, such as an address that's one character off from someone you email regularly. Paubox holds that recipient and emails you so you can send the message or stop it. Wrong Recipients Detection is available to Paubox Email Suite customers. An admin turns it on in Settings → Outbound Security, and Mailbox Access must be connected first.

How Wrong Recipients Detection works

Paubox learns who each sender emails from their Sent folder. This history is personal to each sender: Paubox compares a recipient only against the addresses that same sender has emailed before, up to their 1,000 most frequent recipients.

When someone sends an email, Paubox checks every recipient. A recipient is held when the address looks like a typo of a person the sender already emails, or a typo of a domain they already email. For example, a message to jane.doe@exmaple.com would be held if the sender regularly emails jane.doe@example.com.

Wrong Recipients Detection doesn't hold an email just because the recipient is new. At the default sensitivity, sending to a new person at a domain you already email, or to a brand-new domain, goes through normally. An admin can make detection stricter or more lenient with the confidence threshold in Settings → Outbound Security.

What happens when a recipient is held

Holds apply to each recipient, not the whole message. If you send an email to three people and one address looks wrong, the other two receive it right away.

The sender gets an email notification with two links: one to send the message to the held recipient and one to stop it. The sender can respond directly from that email without logging in to the Paubox dashboard. Held recipients also appear in Outbound Quarantine under the Wrong recipient category.

If the sender doesn't respond, Paubox applies your account's default action when the hold time runs out. By default the hold lasts 5 minutes and the message is released for delivery. An admin can change both the hold length and what happens at timeout in Settings → Outbound Security.

Requirements

Wrong Recipients Detection builds sender history from your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, so Mailbox Access must be connected first. Organizations on other email platforms can't use Wrong Recipients Detection.

If Paubox can't check a message for any reason, the email is delivered normally. Wrong Recipients Detection never blocks mail because of a problem on the Paubox side.

What to expect

Wrong Recipients Detection compares addresses, so it can hold a message that was correct. If two colleagues at your organization have addresses that differ by a character or two, emailing one of them for the first time can trigger a hold. Messages sent to a distribution list or group address also don't count toward history for the individual people in that group.

Calendar invitations work a little differently. Each change to a meeting, such as a new time, an added attendee or a cancellation, is sent as a separate message. If a recipient on an invitation is held, you may get a notification for each update.