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Use cases → Email operations

Set up organization-wide alerts for sensitive keywords

Monitor all user mailboxes for specific keywords and alert security teams when matches appear, using a delegated service account.

Who it is forSecurity and compliance teams needing to detect policy violations or leaks across the domain.
APIsGmail API
Typical scopesgmail.readonly

The problem

Sensitive terms or data may be sent or received by anyone, but manual review is impractical at scale. Automated keyword monitoring across all mailboxes is required to catch violations early.

How it works

  1. Use a service account with domain-wide delegation and the gmail.readonly scope.
  2. Iterate over all users to fetch recent messages using the Gmail API.
  3. Scan message bodies and attachments for target keywords.
  4. Notify the designated team when a match is found, including relevant metadata.
  5. Log each scan and result for auditability.

What changes

Security or compliance incidents are detected across the organisation in near real time, reducing the risk of undetected data leaks or policy breaches.

The trap in this one. Gmail API's history and message list endpoints are eventually consistent and can lag behind real-time mail delivery by several minutes. Scans may miss messages that are rapidly deleted or moved before propagation completes, leading to blind spots that are only apparent after an incident. Relying on message IDs alone for deduplication will miss edits or replacements, as new content can arrive under the same thread but with a different message ID.

Questions people ask

How often should scans run to minimise lag?

Polling every few minutes reduces but does not eliminate risk; consider combining with push notifications for higher sensitivity, but expect some delay regardless.

Can this scan attachments as well as message bodies?

Yes, but attachment content must be fetched and decoded explicitly; this adds API calls and increases quota usage per scan.

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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