Email has revolutionized how businesses communicate. But email also makes it easy to transport confidential information and valuable intellectual property outside your organization — without anyone knowing until it's too late. To combat these threats, enterprises must develop clear policies for outbound email content and should adopt technology to monitor and enforce such policies.

In this paper, we discuss the risks posed by outbound email as a conduit for "leakage" of proprietary and confidential information. It also describes the steps organizations can take to develop email security policies and then help enforce and monitor them with technology. Best practices for policy development are explained and key technology recommendations are made.