Email Providers

Connect Herd to your organization's mail provider so that when users report a phishing simulation, Herd credits them with the report in your campaign results.

When users report a Herd phishing simulation using their mail client's built-in Report phishing button, Herd can detect that report and credit them in your campaign results. This is configured per provider under Settings → Integrations → Email Providers in the Herd admin console.

The Email Providers section in Herd Settings, showing the Gmail (Google Workspace) tile expanded with an Enable polling button.
Settings → Integrations → Email Providers

Choose your provider

Both providers can be enabled side-by-side — Herd polls each user's mailbox via the appropriate integration based on their domain.

How report detection works (in brief)

After Herd sends a phishing simulation, it periodically checks each recipient's mailbox via the provider API to see what happened to that specific message. When the user clicks Report phishing (or Report spam / Report Junk), the mail provider moves the message out of the inbox. Herd detects that move on its next polling cycle — typically within 5 minutes — and marks the simulation as Reported for that user.

A few things common to both providers:

  • Read-only. Herd reads message metadata (labels/folder placement and a small set of forwarding-related headers) on the specific messages it sent. It never reads general message bodies, sends mail, modifies messages, or deletes anything.

  • Recent campaigns only. Herd polls mailboxes for simulations sent in the last 30 days. Older campaigns are not re-checked.

  • Reports require user action. A simulation is only credited as reported when the user moves it out of the inbox. Auto-classification by the provider's spam filter (where the user never saw the message) does not count.

  • Backfill is automatic. Once you turn polling on, every simulation in the last-30-day window becomes pollable on the next cycle — including reports users had already filed before you enabled this.

  • Recipients must be in your domain/tenant. Polling is scoped to the domain (Gmail) or tenant (Outlook) you connected. External recipients are not polled.

Provider-specific setup steps, exact permission scopes, and troubleshooting live on the Gmail and Outlook pages.

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