For security reasons we need to disable users abilities to create rules in the Outlook application. I have searched high and low and cannot find where or how this can be done... Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My 2 pennies: Cart before the horse? Rules are good, hackers are bad, First stop hackers (MFA, block basic auth, P1 conditional access etc, whatever works for your situation). Run daily reports on successful Logins (are they coming from your offices or from Nigeria), run reports on Failed Logins (has the Hacker community found another way trying to bypass MFA?), train users on phishing techniques. All this can be automated for pennies, and will stop any successful hacks (if they are good enough) within hours or less. Still too long but you can't always win them all.Blocking rules does nothing to help you imho, modern hackers don't even create rules anymore, too obvious. But again, just my opinion. Next month it might all change again, that's the fun of it....

VasilMichev Thank you, I don't think that would help. The purpose is to stop any malicious people who have stolen credentials from creating rules. They would be accessing it from outside our domain.

Andy David Well in this case the bad actor, we will call him Jimmy, intercepted an email about a incoming wire from a client to our company of a VERY large amount, using stolen credentials. Jimmy convinced the client to send the money to another bank account, telling them our original account was compromised. The client, thinking that the contact was still the proper person in our company, complied and sent them the money. Jimmy was smart enough to set up a rule for all incoming and sent emails to and from the clients domain to be moved to the RSS feeds folder, which no one on God's green earth uses, so that the real employee, whose credentials were stolen, within our company would never see them. A lot of things were done wrong by the client, there were quite a few red flags and they never called to confirm with us. We also should have had better security long ago. But one of the measures the company partners would like to make to help ensure this never happens again, is to stop all rules from being created. Or at the very least some form of alert whenever one is created. This is not a terrible request as it is a VERY common way the Jimmies of the world operate. You may think it unnecessary, but if you lost this amount of money maybe you would change your mind? It may be extreme, but thankfully almost no one in our company uses rules. And it will put the minds of our accounting folks and partners at rest. Thanks for your input!

Nathee021 Was this before or after MFA was implemented? 🙂 So, of course, this is just my personal opinion, but I still think that preventing a user from creating rules is overkill and alot of unnecessary FUD. That same bad actor could do alot of bad things if they have the creds beyond rules, but I get it, its important to these customers. I dont think there is really an option to do this on the Outlook side. I was thinking setting the rulesquota may work, but the minimum is 32KB. Good Luck however.

Nathee021 It looks like it can be set in OWA policy under Information Management / Inbox Rules. I'd thought in Outlook you'd be able to set it via Group Policy but I've had a look at the available options in the OL2016 template and don't see anything which covers it.Which is a bit strange. You would think that anything that could be enabled / disabled in OWA that isn't OWA exclusive should also be configurable in Outlook. Failing that you'd probably have to look at updating the My Base Options roles for the users which I think includes rule settings.So users would still see rules management in Outlook but wouldn't be able to apply any changes.

Disable users ability to create rules...

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Neill
Brass Contributor
Nov 21, 2019
Nathee021
It looks like it can be set in OWA policy under Information Management / Inbox Rules.

I'd thought in Outlook you'd be able to set it via Group Policy but I've had a look at the available options in the OL2016 template and don't see anything which covers it.
Which is a bit strange. You would think that anything that could be enabled / disabled in OWA that isn't OWA exclusive should also be configurable in Outlook.

Failing that you'd probably have to look at updating the My Base Options roles for the users which I think includes rule settings.
So users would still see rules management in Outlook but wouldn't be able to apply any changes.
- Nathee021
  Copper Contributor
  Nov 21, 2019
  Neill Thank you for the response! I did disable that, doesn't that only apply to creating rules in the web app though?
  
  I will look into the My Base Options and see. Thank you!
  - VasilMichev
    MVP
    Nov 21, 2019
    There's now way to disable this for the desktop client afaik. The only thing I could think of is to disable the corresponding buttons/UI controls, but for that to work you will need to know the actual control IDs. Check here for more info: https://www.slipstick.com/how-to-outlook/group-policy-disable-commands/

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Disable users ability to create rules...

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