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Use cases → Email operations

Alert on sensitive keywords in inbound email

Scan all incoming mail for high-risk terms and trigger alerts for review, without relying on per-user inbox rules.

Who it is forSecurity or compliance teams tasked with monitoring for data leakage or policy violations.
APIsGmail API
Typical scopesgmail.readonly

The problem

Sensitive terms — like account numbers, legal names, or flagged project codenames — can appear in inbound mail and require immediate review. Native Gmail filters lack context and cannot reliably alert compliance teams at scale, especially across multiple user inboxes.

How it works

  1. Poll new mail across all relevant user inboxes using a delegated service account.
  2. Extract message content and scan for a predefined list of sensitive keywords.
  3. Log matches and trigger alerts (email, webhook, or ticket) to the compliance team.
  4. Optionally, label or star the flagged messages for later audit.

What changes

Compliance teams receive early warnings when high-risk terms appear in email, with a clear audit trail and minimal user-side configuration.

The trap in this one. The Gmail API's messages.list endpoint does not guarantee inbox ordering when using query filters. If you rely on polling with a query (e.g., after:timestamp), you will sometimes miss messages that arrive out-of-order or are indexed late. Always track the historyId and use the history API for incremental scans, or you will find gaps in your alerting — especially after outages or restarts.

Questions people ask

Can this system read attachments as well as message bodies?

Not by default. Attachments need to be fetched and decoded separately, and scanning them at scale raises quota and performance issues.

Will users know their mail is being scanned?

No end-user notification is generated by the Gmail API. However, admins must ensure users are informed as required by local policy.

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 guide

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