Forum Discussion
How to apply sensitivity labels to external emails received in my Outlook?
I have created a sensitivity label and an auto-labeling policy that applies the label when an email contains sensitive information. When an internal user sends the email, the label is applied correctly. But when I receive an email with sensitive information from an external user, the label is not applied. How can I apply the sensitivity label to emails that come from external users?
3 Replies
The label isn’t applying because auto-labeling evaluates internal messages at send time, but evaluates external messages only after they land in your tenant. To label inbound external mail automatically, you can either enable auto-labeling at rest for Exchange, or use Purview DLP / transport rules to classify incoming messages during delivery. If you'd like to discuss different ways teams are approaching this in real environments, I’m always happy to connect and exchange ideas.
If got your discription right: What Jalixio writes.
If it comes to something like 'all emails from mailto:email address removed for privacy reasons' you can use mail flow rules as an trigger.
Hello Asutosh,
The reason your label is applied to outgoing email but not to incoming email from external users is due to the limitation of Label Settings in Microsoft Purview.
Label settings : only work client side in office apps. They cannot automatically labeling incoming emails. Auto-labelling policies : applied service-side and can label incoming emails.
To fix it : You have to create an auto-labeling policy in Purview not just configure Label settings.
Source : according to the microsoft learn documentation, automatic labelling doesn't work on incoming email when only label settings configured If this helped a like would be appreciated.
Best regards,
Moetaz RABAI
