Managing policies

Administrator Help | Forcepoint Email Security | Version 8.4.x

An email policy is applied based on defined sender/recipient conditions and the direction of the email. You can apply a different policy to different groups of senders and recipients. For example, you might apply a policy to a marketing department group in your organization and a different policy to a human resources group. After you define a set of senders and recipients in a policy, you can add the policy rules to apply when the sender/recipient conditions of the email match the policy.

Policy rules comprise the filters and filter actions that determine how a message that matches a policy's sender/recipient conditions is handled. Filters provide the basis for email analysis, and filter actions determine the final disposition of a message when it triggers a particular filter. After you have created and configured filters and filter actions, they are available for inclusion in your policies. See Managing filters and Managing filter actions for information about configuring filters and filter actions.

Three types of policies are available, depending on the direction of the email—inbound, outbound, or internal. Message direction is determined on the basis of an organization's protected domain addresses:

Inbound - The sender address is not from a protected domain, and the recipient address is in a protected domain

Outbound - The sender address is from a protected domain, and the recipient address is not in a protected domain

Internal - Both the sender and recipient addresses are in a protected domain.

One predefined default policy is available for each email direction, along with a default data loss prevention (DLP) policy for each direction.

Data loss prevention policies may be applied to email in any direction. These policies are configured in the Data Security module of the Forcepoint Security Manager and are enabled or disabled in the Email Security module. You need to register the Email Security module with the Data Security module and click Deploy in the Data Security module for the policies to be active. See Enabling data loss prevention policies for details.

Changing policy order

After you add a policy, you can select it and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to move it up or down in the policy list in order to specify when the policy is applied. When message conditions match a policy, subsequent policies in the list are not applied.

You cannot change the order of default policies. They are applied last when a message matches no other policy.

Deleting a policy

You can remove a policy by marking the check box next to the policy name on the Policies page and clicking Delete. Note that a default policy cannot be deleted.