Misdirected Email Prevention
Prevent Accidental Data Loss from Misdirected Emails
Most data leaks aren't exfiltration — they're mistakes. Misdirected Email Prevention uses behavioral AI to detect outbound emails headed to the wrong recipient, stops them before delivery, and prompts senders to confirm or cancel.
Misdirected email is the top cause of accidental data loss and top-reported GDPR violation.
UK ICO — Data Security Incident Trends
Average time to identify and remediate a misdirected email incident
Ponemon Institute, May 2022
Organizations that experienced data loss or exposure from misdirected email within the past year.
Abnormal 2025 State of Misdirected Email Prevention
The Challenge
Traditional DLP Tools Were Never Built to Interpret Human Intent
Why Abnormal
Behavioral Context Catches Mistakes That Rules-Based Tools Miss
Competitors rely on static rules. Abnormal uses behavioral AI to detect when an email looks contextually wrong for the intended recipient, without requiring teams to build or maintain complex policies.
Content-Aware Detection
MEP builds a per-user behavioral baseline using sender-recipient communication history, message context, and behavioral signals to identify likely unintended-recipient mistakes that traditional rules miss.
Operationally Light by Design
Customers don’t need to write, tune, or maintain static policies. Abnormal handles that work automatically, reducing administrative overhead and minimizing the false positives that rigid rule sets often create.
End-User Remediation
Instead of flooding the SOC with alerts for manual investigation, Abnormal routes suspicious emails to the sender—the person with the most context—so they can quickly confirm or cancel the message.
Unified Email Security Platform
MEP runs on the same data model as Inbound Email Security and uses the same deployment, portal, and identity model, giving customers a single place to manage both inbound threats and outbound mistakes.
Protection for Outbound Emails
Detect Misdirected Email and Guide Fast Resolution
Behavioral AI Detection
MEP identifies likely misdirected emails by analyzing recipient context, communication patterns, content signals, and metadata—without requiring customers to build static rules or tune policies.
Automated Blocking
When MEP identifies a likely misdirected email, it holds the message in quarantine before delivery, stopping accidental exposure.
Sender Self-Remediation
When Abnormal flags a likely misdirected email, it immediately notifies the sender, explains why the message was flagged, and gives them a clear choice to release or cancel it—resolving most cases without SOC involvement.
Explainability & Recipient Analysis
Each detection shows the actual recipient, the likely intended recipient, and the reason for the flag, giving senders and analysts a clear rationale for action.
Outbound Log & Audit Trail
The Outbound Log centralizes detections, user decisions, admin actions, and feedback in one place to support investigations, reporting, and compliance.
RBAC Controls
Global and tenant-level admin settings govern detection and remediation privileges, ensuring that only authorized users can adjust policies or release quarantined messages.
Frictionless Deployment
MEP is designed to deliver value quickly without a complex rollout or another tool to manage. Setup takes just minutes and runs quietly in the background. It integrates with Microsoft 365 through SMTP relay alongside your existing Abnormal deployment, requiring no MX changes, no inline proxy, and no disruption to mail flow. Customers can begin in API detection mode for a low-friction evaluation, then move to monitor or block modes as needed.
Privacy-First by Design
Abnormal does not persistently store email body content. When you need to review a message, the content is retrieved on demand, while activity data is stored to support investigations and compliance needs.
Over 25% of the Fortune 500 Trust Abnormal AI to Make Automated, Critical Security Decisions
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Customer Voice
What Security Leaders Say
“Abnormal's automation gives our analysts time back to work on other projects, and the fact that it's API-based gives us flexibility to tie in other applications and their data.”
John Roeser
Senior Manager, Information Security, Domino's
“Our goals are to get away from being so reliant on human judgment and leverage AI to be proactive. Abnormal helps us with those goals.”
Corey Kaemming
Senior Director, Information Security, Valvoline
Abnormal powers over 4,500 customers, including over 25% of the Fortune 500.
FAQ
Related Resources
Stop Data Leaks Before They Start
See how Abnormal prevents misdirected emails in your organization.