Company e-mails have to follow some policies before they can be sent out from an organization. If these policies are strict or not depends on the business field. To get an example from a customer company I am working with: They are signing ALL their e-mails by using S/MIME while e-mails to some specific partners will be automatically encrypted.
The goal is that users do not need to think about these things. For them it should be as easy as possible.
Some other policies are for example that Exchange notifies the user that an e-mail has no attachment, if the user writes about attachments in in this e-mails and then tries to send it without any attachment. There are many things we can automate for our users.
In this article I want to show how to add a legal disclaimer to all mails sent out from the organization. This works for Exchange on-premises and for Office 365 (Exchange online).
How to add
To be able to add the legal disclaimer, we need to connect to our Exchange Admin Center and there we browse to Mail Flow > Rules. Here we click the New (+) button.
After we click on the (+) button it shows us a dropdown menu where we choose the option Apply disclaimer…
A new window will be opened now with an empty rule set in which we can start modifying the rule set:
First thing we have to do here is to enter a text by clicking on Enter text.
The next step is to set one of three fall back actions Exchange can take if it cannot apply the disclaimer to the message. Here’s a short overview about what the options mean:
- Reject: Exchange rejects the message and sends a non-delivery report to the sender. The message is not delivered.
- Ignore: Exchange accepts the message and delivers it to the recipient without the disclaimer.
- Wrap: Exchange creates a new email message with disclaimer and adds the original email message as an attachment.
The next step is to set for whom this rule should apply. In our example we want to add the disclaimer only to e-mails sent out of our organization. Therefore, we have to choose the sender is located…
Now, a new selection window will open. Here we choose Outside the organization.
We can also specify whether the rule will be active right away by selecting Enforce. However, it is always recommended to test the rule first. We can do this by selecting one of the test options. Whether we pick policy tips or not will determine if our users see any policy tips in Outlook while we are testing.
Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash