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Use cases → Email operations

Flag emails organisation-wide for sensitive keywords

Automatically scan all incoming and outgoing mail for policy keywords using a delegated service account, surfacing matches for review or escalation.

Who it is forSecurity or compliance teams needing to monitor communications for regulated or risky terms.
APIsGmail API, Admin SDK
Typical scopesgmail.readonly, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Manual review of all mail for sensitive content is impossible at scale, but missing a critical term can expose the organisation to legal or reputational risk. Built-in Google Workspace tools only cover DLP at certain SKUs, and lack custom logic or reporting integration.

How it works

  1. List all users in scope using the Admin SDK.
  2. For each account, impersonate the user with the service account and poll their mailbox for new messages.
  3. Parse message content for keywords, including attachments if required.
  4. Log and surface matches for human review or downstream automation, tagging messages or sending alerts as needed.

What changes

All relevant mail is scanned within minutes of receipt or sending, and potential policy breaches are flagged without requiring user intervention.

The trap in this one. Polling the Gmail API for every user quickly hits per-user and per-customer rate limits, especially in larger domains. This does not throw a clear error: requests are throttled with HTTP 429s or silently delayed, causing blind spots where new mail is not scanned for several hours if the polling loop is not carefully rate-limited and staggered across accounts.

Watch it explained

“5 Ways to Use Gemini AI in Google Workspace (Gemini Advanced)” — Ting Hsiao on YouTube. Third-party video, included because it covers this ground well. We are not affiliated with the channel.

Questions people ask

Can I use push notifications instead of polling?

Gmail push notifications ('watch') require individual setup per user and are not reliable for large multi-user monitoring, as they can stop without notice and require renewal.

Are attachments included in keyword scans?

Not by default. You must fetch and decode each attachment separately via the API, which counts against quota and can slow down large-scale scans.

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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