Microsoft 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies have wide-ranging capabilities when it comes to rules and exceptions. One exception covers the various types of encrypted email that can pass through the Exchange Online transport pipeline. As it happens, three message types are supported, but who could have guessed that permission controlled means rights management?
To make Microsoft 365 DLP policies work like Exchange transport-rule based DLP, a January change will switch evaluation of sender conditions away from envelope information to message headers. Although this change might seem to be something beloved of email geeks, it’s actually an important update for organizations who want to move away from ETR-based DLP to Microsoft 365 DLP policies.
Microsoft plans to surface recommendations to use communications compliance policies as part of its DLP workflow. That sounds acceptable, but it’s the second example of how Microsoft pushes high-priced premium features to Office 365 tenants through DLP. Apart from the undesirability of pushing features to customers through software, communications compliance is not something that you implement on a whim, so why does Microsoft think this is a good idea?