Use cases → Admin and governance
Alert on policy violation keywords in email
Automatically flag and notify on sensitive or banned keywords in user email using a delegated service account.
| Who it is for | IT and compliance teams monitoring for policy breaches across the organisation. |
|---|---|
| APIs | Gmail API |
| Typical scopes | gmail.readonly |
The problem
Manual review of user email for sensitive terms is impractical and error-prone, especially at scale. Automated DLP solutions often lack customisation or require heavier licensing.
How it works
- Delegate domain-wide authority to a service account with Gmail read access.
- Periodically fetch recent messages for each user.
- Scan message bodies and subjects for policy keywords.
- Raise an alert or log an event if a match is found.
What changes
Policy violations are detected in near real-time and can be acted on quickly, with clear audit trails for each alert.
Questions people ask
Can I scan attachments for keywords too?
Yes, but you must handle MIME decoding and the API only provides attachment data after an extra fetch per attachment, compounding quota issues.
How quickly do new emails become available via the API?
Messages usually appear within seconds, but propagation can lag by several minutes for high-volume users.
Want this built?
This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.
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