Use cases → Email operations
Monitor all mail for sensitive keywords domain-wide
Scan every user's inbox and sent mail for keywords of concern, using a delegated service account to maintain coverage over time.
| Who it is for | Security or compliance teams needing to flag or act on risky communication patterns across the organisation. |
|---|---|
| APIs | Gmail API |
| Typical scopes | gmail.readonly |
The problem
Sensitive terms in email can indicate data leakage, policy breaches, or compliance issues, but relying on users to report or on manual sampling misses most cases. Automated monitoring must cover the entire domain, including new and infrequently used accounts, without gaps.
How it works
- Use domain-wide delegation to impersonate each user in the tenant.
- Iterate through mailboxes and search for flagged keywords in recent messages.
- Log and report any matches, including context for review.
- Schedule regular sweeps and track processed history IDs to avoid duplicate alerts.
What changes
All mailboxes are checked for risky terms, including those that rarely see human review, and alerts arrive as soon as new hits are found.
Watch it explained
“how to automate gmail using google apps script” — Matt Brigidi on YouTube. Third-party video, included because it covers this ground well. We are not affiliated with the channel.
Questions people ask
How scalable is this approach for large tenants?
Delegated service accounts can process thousands of users, but Gmail API quota and parallelism limits mean you must batch users and handle rate limiting explicitly.
Does the user see any trace of the monitoring?
No, impersonation via domain-wide delegation is invisible to the user; there are no read receipts or visible access logs in the UI.
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.
Talk to us Or read the setup guideRelated use cases
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