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KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security

Behavioral-AI email security for Microsoft 365: inbound phishing, outbound DLP, and encryption.

KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security Overview

What it does

KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security is an Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) platform that guards Microsoft 365 mailboxes against inbound and outbound email threats. It combines three modules: Defend for inbound anti-phishing, Prevent for outbound data loss, and Protect for policy-based email encryption. Rather than relying on signatures or blocklists, the platform applies self-learning behavioral AI and natural language processing to model each user's normal communication patterns, catching business email compromise, account takeover, and AI-generated impersonation that gateway tools miss.

How it works

The platform connects to Microsoft 365 through the Microsoft Graph API as a post-delivery layer, or runs as an inline SMTP gateway, so it deploys without changing MX records. Defend ingests historical mail to build per-user and per-vendor behavioral baselines, then applies natural language processing and semantic analysis to flag phishing, deepfake-driven impersonation, and zero-day account compromise, inserting color-coded warning banners into Outlook messages across 13 languages. Prevent analyzes outbound mail to stop misdirected messages and data exfiltration, while Protect adds policy-based encryption. User-reported messages feed detection, and confirmed threats are remediated retroactively across all inboxes.

Credentials and traction

KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security is SOC 2 Type II certified, part of KnowBe4's ISO 27001 audited information security program. It was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms, its second consecutive year in the Leaders quadrant after placing in the inaugural 2024 edition as Egress. The platform targets enterprises standardized on Microsoft 365 that need behavioral defense against phishing, business email compromise, and outbound data loss.

Key Capabilities

mapped to solution categories
Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES)

Detects signs of internal mailbox compromise (anomalous login geography, mail forwarding rule creation, unusual send volume), and can trigger automated session revocation.

Checks outbound messages before they are sent for recipients who do not match the sender's normal communication pattern, wrong or lookalike addresses, and attachments that do not belong with the message, and warns or blocks the sender, so accidental data exposure by misaddressed email is stopped at the point of sending.

Detects AI-generated impersonation in email-borne fraud - synthetic text, deepfake audio and video lures, and cloned sender styles - beyond signature and rule-based content analysis.

Separates newsletters and bulk mail from threats by routing them to dedicated folders, refining classification from how each user files messages.

Inserts dynamic banners into delivered messages flagging risk signals such as first-time senders, lookalike domains, or unusual payment requests at read time.

Builds per-user and per-vendor communication baselines from historical email patterns to detect anomalous content, timing, or sender behavior without relying on signatures or blocklists.

Extends the same phishing, malware, and social-engineering detection applied to email to messages and files in collaboration and productivity tools such as Teams, Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Salesforce, through the tools' APIs, so threats that arrive outside the inbox are caught by the same policies and remediation.

Connects to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace via native APIs for visibility into internal and delivered mail, enabling post-delivery clawback without changing MX records.

Presents one quarantine and release workflow across the vendor's own detections and the cloud email provider's native filtering, so administrators and end users do not manage two split quarantines when an API-based product is layered on Microsoft Defender for Office 365 or Google Workspace.

Automates the intake, deduplication, and triage of user-submitted suspicious emails, cross-references against in-flight campaigns and triggers retroactive remediation across all recipients.

Detects compromised or spoofed third-party supplier accounts by analyzing communication pattern deviations, domain aging, and content signals, targeting invoice fraud and payment redirection attacks.

Analyzes email body text semantically to detect social engineering, pretexting, and urgency manipulation in messages that contain no malicious attachments or URLs.

Compliance

certifications
ISO 27001ISO/IEC 42001SOC 2 Type IISOC 3

Integrations

compatible tools
Microsoft 365Microsoft Defender XDRMicrosoft Sentinel

Implementation & support

Deployment model
Agentless (API Integration)SaaS
Support channels
Knowledge BaseTicketing Portal

Info last updated on September 7, 2026

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