Modify an existing Safe Links policy

  • 2 minutes

To modify an existing Safe Links policy, complete the following steps:

  1. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, select Show All in the left-hand navigation pane, and then under Admin centers, select Security.
  2. In the Microsoft Defender portal, select Policies and rules in the left-hand navigation pane.
  3. On the Policies and rules page, select Threat policies.
  4. On the Threat policies page, under the Policies section, select Safe Links.
  5. On the Safe Links page, select a policy from the list and select on it (don't select the check box).
  6. In the policy details pane that appears, edit the settings for each section you must change.
  7. The available settings in the detail pane are identical to those policies described in the earlier unit on creating a Safe Links policy in Microsoft Defender XDR.

The Safe Links service automatically assigns policies a priority based on their order of creation. So the first policy you create is assigned priority 0, which is the highest priority policy. The second policy you create (priority 1) has the next priority, and so on. Newer policies have a lower priority than older policies.

A lower priority number indicates a higher priority for the policy (priority 0 is the highest). Safe Links processes the policies in priority order. In other words, it processes higher priority policies before lower priority policies (priority 0 policy processed first; priority 4 policy processed last). No two policies can have the same priority, and policy processing stops after it applies the first policy.

In Microsoft Defender XDR, you can only change the priority of the Safe Links policy after you create it. In PowerShell, you can override the default priority when you create the Safe Links rule (which can affect the priority of existing rules).

Additional reading. For more information about the order of precedence and how the system evaluates and applies multiple policies, see Order and precedence of email protection.