How can I restrict recipients of an email from downloading attachments?

Question

Hello All,

I will like to send an email to all staff, but will like to place some restrictions on the email

• No forwarding
• No download of attachments
• No printing of attachment
• No printing of email

I have been able to figure out how to restrict the forwarding, buy doing this below

Please will appreciate if anyone can assist with the restrictions for downloading attachments. Can this be done from the outlook client app?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Hi @ifeanyi onyejekwe ,

From the perspective of Outlook client, I am afraid there is no option available to prevent recipients from downloading the attachments.

In this case, based on my research, you may consider asking the senders to upload the attachment to a cloud service, such as OneDrive, and add the file to the email as a link in the message body.
You can set the permission to “ Can View “, and further select the option to Block download, which means they cannot save a local copy. Here is a document about how to share and change permission in OneDrive: share onedrive files and folders
When I test on my Office365 account, it works:
1.Upload the file to OneDrive and do the following operations:

2.Paste the link into the body of the message
3.When the recipient opens the link, the message bar prompts: You don’t have permission to download or print this file.

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Answer 2

If this is an internal audience, you might be able to enforce some control via Conditional Access policies, as detailed for example here: https://c7solutions.com/2018/12/read-only-and-attachment-download-restrictions-in-exchange-online
This only affects OWA though, not Outlook. So you're probably better off storing the item in SPO/ODFB and sharing a link to the document instead.