Followed immediately by HR sending an unsigned email about critical deadlines for benefits or something, telling you to click a link and/or a PDF attachment.
What's with https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/? Why?
I work at a small company, so I don't know if this is how any IRL organizations work, but it's how I assumed the procedure went.
At one of my previous jobs, there was this big part of intranet that was used by sysadmins, and various other people from fields other than software development. My team didn't have to deal with it, so we weren't even aware of it, much less had access to it. One day, however, someone wanted me to review a document from there. I bounced off the "Unauthorized" error, and dutifully followed the instructions to fill in an appropriate box with a justification, and send a request to be granted access.
The issue wasn't critical, so I didn't pester anyone about it, just patiently waited for the access, re-filing my request every other month. Many months later, with me still not getting access, I eventually brought this up to my boss, who then smiled and told me that this access request form literally goes to /dev/null. Apparently after some software migration, no one bothered to connect this to anything.
I think it shouldn't be too hard to write an Outlook plugin to do this.
Imagine if someone from your benefits provider called and asked for your social security number or other PII for confirmation. Would you give it to them? I hope not. You should ask (as I always do) for their name and extension and tell them that you'll return their call through a published telephone number. Never once have I had someone balk at that, and I've done it countless times for many years.
For a link to a benefits provider, it's trivial to log into the portal through a known good domain and look around for whatever piece of information or news they were trying to communicate.
The hard issues come with all the random services HR contracts for stuff like harassment training, etc. If I can't corroborate a link myself then as a last resort I can simply ask HR (or w'ever department) directly, or as previously said just ignore it and wait for someone to say something.
At some point the usage of so many third-party services is just an insane security risk. It's almost comical when the corp security team runs a phishing test and on the same day you get a half-dozen e-mail messages from other departments with twice as many links to random domains. At some point you're just like, "fsck 'em" and have half a mind to not bother caring anymore. But it's not just their security on the line, it's yours, too.
I still use mutt for personal e-mail so maybe this is all easier for me. I've yet to become accustomed to hidden links or embedded multimedia in e-mail.