Administrators can now take action on password-protected office files in Gmail

Whether you are in healthcare, financial services, or another regulated industry, G Suite is dedicated to giving administrators more control over their mail. For customers who need to store unencrypted copies of messages for regulatory purposes, a new attachment compliance filter for Gmail is being released that will allow you to specify rules for how to handle password protected office files.


Once launched, you will have a new option in the attachment compliance filters which detects whether an attached office file, such as a Microsoft Office or LibreOffice document, is password protected, and therefore encrypted. From there, you can define what action to take on the message. For example, you can reject messages, detect particular attachment types or names, re-route the message, add a header, or prepend a string to the subject. You can also modify a message by stripping its attachments and adding an advisory notice to the message. The compliance filter is only triggered by whether the attachment is password-protected or not.


Many G Suite customers have already deployed Advanced Gmail filters from the Admin console in order to meet their specific IT security requirements. To learn more, visit our Help Center article on how to Set up filters for attachment compliance.


Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1-3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI


More Information
Help Center