Encrypt mail with IRM in Outlook
To help prevent information leakage, Office 365 includes the Information Rights Management (IRM) function, which provides online and offline protection for email messages and attachments. You can set up Exchange IRM for any email you want to send quickly and easily, we’ll show you in the guide below.
What is IRM ?
IRM is an encryption solution that also applies to usage restrictions for email messages. Helps prevent unauthorized people from printing, forwarding or copying confidential information.
What he does ?
IRM: uses encryption and usage restrictions to provide online and offline protection for email messages and attachments. Allows users to manually apply templates in Outlook or Outlook on the web.
What he doesn't ?
Some applications may not support IRM email messages on all devices.
At the moment, IRM also does not allow protection of PDF files attached to e-mails.
Recomendations and example scenarios
It is recommended that you use IRM to impose usage and encryption restrictions. For example:
An employee who sends confidential details to a customer can make a mistake and send the information to someone he doesn't want. When applying the “Do not forward” option, recipients will not be able to forward, print or copy the content. The same would do for a seller who needs to share an offer proposal with another company, including attachments that require email and attachments to be protected.
Types of files that can be protected by IRM when they are attached to messages:
- Word Documents: (.doc, .docx, .docm, .dot, .dotx, .dotm).
- Excel Documents: (.xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlt, .xltx, .xltm, .xlsb, .xla, .xlam).
- PowerPoint Documents: (.ppt, .pptx, .pptm, .pot, .potx, .potm, .pps, .ppsx, .ppsm, .thmx).
- InfoPach Files: (.xsn).
- XPS Documents: (.xps).
Encrypt e-mail in outlook
Users can apply a template to an email message to control the permissions that recipients have on an email. Some actions, such as forwarding or extracting information from a message, saving a message or printing it, can be controlled by applying one of the available templates.
Avaliable templates:
-
Encrypt only: This message is encrypted. The recipients cannot remove the encryption (With this option we encrypt the email and its content but it will be accessible to the recipients).
-
Do not Forward: The recipients can read this message, but cannot forward, print or copy the content. The owner of the conversation has full permission to your message and all replies to it. (More restrictive and recommended template for sending confidential data. Recipients may not forward, print, take screenshots or show the message in a video call).
How to apply templates in Outlook Desktop
Now that you know what IRM is, how it works and the details of the templates, we can see how to apply these changes to an email we want to send.
We can go to Outlook in its desktop version and create a new email:
When we have created the new email, we will go to the option section:
Finally, we will see the option to encrypt and when clicking on it, all available templates will be displayed:
How to apply templates in Outlook Web
From Outlook Web click on "New Message"
We click on "Encrypt" and by default it will choose the "Encrypt only" template. We can click on "Change permissions" to choose another option
