domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Email operations

Monitor all mailboxes for sensitive keywords in real time

Scan every user's email for terms that indicate compliance or security issues, using delegated access and scheduled probes.

Who it is forSecurity and compliance teams needing early warning of sensitive data leaks or policy violations.
APIsGmail API
Typical scopesgmail.readonly

The problem

Sensitive terms in email—like 'confidential', 'password', or regulatory triggers—must be caught before they leave the organisation or propagate internally. Manual review is impossible at scale, and users rarely self-report.

How it works

  1. Enumerate all users with the Admin SDK and maintain an up-to-date list.
  2. For each user, use a delegated service account to search for keywords in recent mail threads via the Gmail API.
  3. Log matches with message IDs, timestamps, and a snippet for review.
  4. Alert the relevant team when new hits are found, but avoid duplicate notifications for the same message.

What changes

You find and respond to policy violations hours after they happen, not months later during an audit.

The trap in this one. Gmail API search queries only match indexed content; there can be a delay of several minutes to hours before newly-received messages appear in search results. This means a 'real-time' monitor may miss incidents if it polls too frequently, or double-reports if it retries before indexing completes.

Questions people ask

How often should the scan run?

Every 15-30 minutes is typical, but adjust based on how quickly you need to act and how much API quota you can afford.

What about attachments or images?

The Gmail API search only covers indexed text, not the raw content of attachments or images. For those, you need to download and scan separately, which increases complexity and quota use.

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

Related use cases

Draft replies automatically in a shared inbox

A delegated service account reads an incoming enquiry, drafts a researched reply in the mailbox, and leaves it for a human to approve and send.

Triage and route inbound mail across a domain

Classify every inbound message, label it, and forward the ones that matter to the person who owns them — without touching a single mail rule.

Send mail as a shared alias from automation

Deliver notifications, confirmations and campaign replies from a branded address like support@ or updates@ without a human in the loop.