How to redact an email in Outlook or Office 365?

TL;DR:

• Redacting an email is necessary to protect sensitive information and comply with privacy laws and regulations.
• There is no manual way to redact an email in Office 365, but senders can recall messages and receivers can delete or manually redact and send back to themselves.
• Strac Office 365 Email DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Redactor App is an automatic way to redact emails and attachments, with audit reports for compliance and security officers.
• Strac's app can also redact old emails to comply with privacy laws.
• Book a meeting with Strac for more information or to see redaction on your emails in 15 minutes.

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 (Requirement 3). By redacting sensitive information, you can prevent potential harm or legal consequences for you and the individuals whose data is in the email.

Can you manually redact, mask, or scrub an email in Office 365?

Unfortunately, there is no way to manually redact an email in Office 365; 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.

Receiver

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

Is there an automatic way to redact an email?

Strac Office 365 Email 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. To redact emails, a business can configure a list of sensitive data elements (SSN, DoB, DL, Passport, CC#, Debit Card, API Keys, etc.). 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 lets you redact (mask) documents automatically in seconds, from emails to pdf, docx, png, jpeg, doc, and xls attachments.

For more information about Office 365 Email Redaction, please read here: https://www.strac.io/integrations/office-365

Below is a quick demo

Is it possible to redact old emails?

Yes, Strac's Office 365 Email Redaction App can also look at older emails and redact all sensitive content from the body and sensitive attachments from email. This is a requirement for many of the compliance frameworks and privacy laws where businesses need to remove customer data from older emails once after the business function is done.

Any questions?

If you have any questions or want to see redaction on your emails in 15 minutes, please book a meeting with us.