Protect and control the sensitive information you email to others.
O n March 7, 2019, Google announced the launch of Gmail confidential mode in beta which could help Gmail users protect sensitive information from unauthorized access. Google will roll out this feature for all the G Suite users with effect from June 25, 2019, and will be set to default ON for all domains with Gmail enabled on it.
What is Confidential Mode in Gmail for G Suite users?
How many times has it happened that you sent a very important or confidential mail to a wrong person? If you realized your mistake very early, you would have clicked on Undo the Message, but what if you were not able to undo it? Let’s take another example. How many times have you wanted that the recipient of the mail should neither download it nor forward it? Your problems related to email confidentiality will end with the introduction of Confidential Mode in Gmail.
With confidential mode, you can prevent the Recipients of messages to copy or print, and even download messages, including attachments. Apart from all this you can also set a message expiration date, revoke message access at any time. Your recipient may also require an SMS verification code to access messages sent by you.
So with this confidential mode, you can protect data even if a recipient’s email account has been hijacked while the message is active or is accidentally being accessed by any other individual.
But at the same time it is also important to understand that although confidential mode can prevent or restrict the recipients from accidentally sharing an email, it doesn’t prevent recipients from taking screenshots or photos of your messages or attachments.
How Confidential Mode works in Gmail?
Here’s a small video that explains how the confidential mode works while you are sending a mail using Gmail.
Let’s understand the back end of how Gmail confidential mode works. So when someone sends a confidential message, what Gmail actually does is, it removes the message body and any attachments from the recipient’s copy of the message and these are further replaced with a link to the content. For a normal Gmail user, the linked content appear as if it’s part of the message but when sent to any other mail server apart from G Suite, you will see a link in place of the content.
How to enable confidential mode in Gmail?
In order to enable or disable the Gmail Confidential Mode, you will be requiring the login credentials of your G Suite Admin Console. Through this, you can either turn on or turn off confidential mode for your entire domain or for specific organizational units.
Following are the steps to disable or enable Gmail confidential mode for your domain:
- Open your Admin console using the link: admin.google.com
- From the Admin console Home page, go to Apps > G Suite > Gmail.
- In User settings, uncheck or check the Enable confidential mode box.
- Save your changes.
How to send messages & attachments using Gmail Confidential Mode?
Firstly, ensure that this feature is turned on by your G Suite Administrator.
- On your G Suite account, open Gmail.
- Click Compose.
- In the bottom right of the window, click on this icon.
- It opens the confidential mode user settings dialogue box where you can modify various settings as shown below:
- Set an expiration date and passcode. These settings impact both the message text and any attachments. If you choose “SMS passcode,” recipients will get a passcode by text message. Make sure you enter the recipient’s phone number, not your own.
- Click Save.
Please note that this feature is available only for G Suite users and not personal or consumer Gmail users. If you are planning to purchase G Suite, visit WIPLON. WIPLON is 18+ years old, one of the Finest Managed Cloud Solutions provider & Google Cloud Partner in India.
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Excellent information
Good feature for security and confidentiality.
Screenshots still remain an issue for data breach but there’s no way to really prevent it. Otherwise the feature will be quite beneficial.