[jimbobimbo]

There's a phrase that large companies often use to explain "puzzling" features like this to detractors: you are not the target audience. Often this phrase is mis-used to cover up straight up bad ideas, but in this case it's right on the money.

The target audience for this feature are CIOs of organizations Google sells G-Suite to. Companies do need IRM on emails, to prevent leaks that could happen by accident or intentionally; to limit email audience; to avoid endless replies-to-all on announcements; to put an expiration date on the "perishable" bits of information; etc. I'm pretty positive that they have to have this to compete with Office 365, which had IRM [1] for a very long time.

Yes, it's not perfect, however, if it's there, it mitigates a lot of the issues I mentioned above. Note the wording: "mitigates", not "fixes".

It's interesting that they still list screenshots as a possibility: email clients (e.g. Outlook) are able to utilize OS mechanisms to prevent those as well. I thought that browser protected media APIs would allow Gmail opt-in to this kind of protection too.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/SecurityComplianc...

[judge2020]

Would like to note more IRM for DLP (data loss prevention) is an upcoming feature:

https://support.google.com/a/table/7539891

> Information Rights Management (IRM) for DLP

> Enable IRM enforcement as a DLP remediation action.

> In development

[dontbenebby]

>The target audience for this feature are CIOs of organizations Google sells G-Suite to. Companies do need IRM on emails, to prevent leaks that could happen by accident or intentionally

I encourage anyone with a Gmail to take a lot back 1, 5, 10 years. There's a lot of data there. Setting up an automated deletion policy can be a great risk mitigation feature.

It won't stop malicious insiders, but it will help make sure run of the mill compromises won't be total disasters.

[NullPrefix]

> It's interesting that they still list screenshots as a possibility: email clients (e.g. Outlook) are able to utilize OS mechanisms to prevent those as well. I thought that browser protected media APIs would allow Gmail opt-in to this kind of protection too.

Next thing you know, youtube ends up on the same list too.