February 3, 2023
2
 min read

How to redact an email in Office 365?

Protect your Office 365 inboxes

Why is there a need to redact an email?

There is a need to redact an email to protect sensitive, confidential or personal information. Redaction helps to ensure that information such as financial data, medical records, personal addresses and phone numbers, and other private information is not disclosed or distributed to unauthorized parties. Additionally, redaction may be required to comply with privacy laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or it may be required for compliance like SOC2, PCI (Payment Card Industry) DSS. By redacting sensitive information, you can prevent potential harm or legal consequences for you and the individuals whose data is in the email.

How can you manually redact or mask or scrub an email in Office 365?

There is no way to redact an email in Office 365 manually; however, you can take some manual steps to either recall if you are a sender OR delete what you received if you are a receiver.

Sender

If a sender accidentally sends an email containing sensitive data, the sender can recall the message.

Recall a message
Recall message in Office 365

Receiver

Once you receive an email containing sensitive data, you can either delete or manually copy it, mask it, and send it back to yourself.

Is there an automatic way to redact an email?

Strac Gmail Redactor App is a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software. It masks (aka redacts) sensitive emails while allowing authorized users to view those emails in Strac UI Vault. A business can configure a list of sensitive data elements (SSN, DoB, DL, Passport, CC#, Debit Card, API Keys, etc.) to redact. Compliance, Risk and Security officers will also get audit reports of who accessed what messages and at what time.

With Strac's 15-minute integration, you can mask (aka redact) your customers' sensitive data in emails. It enables you to redact documents automatically in seconds, from emails to pdf, docx, png, jpeg, doc, and xls attachments.

Strac: Email Auditor - Detect & remove sensitive personal data (PII/PHI) from email | Product Hunt

Founder. YC W22. 11 years at Amazon building Payments Infrastructure (Widget, API, Security).

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