Microsoft will soon give end-users the ability to revoke encrypted email messages sent using its Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) service.

The OME service is built on Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) and lets businesses send encrypted emails to people inside or outside of their organisation using Outlook.com, Gmail and other email services with support for encryption.

Currently, only IT administrators can make use of the service’s ability to revoke encrypted emails that have already sent, but as first reported by Bleeping Computer, Microsoft is planning to expand this capability to end-users in the fourth quarter of 2020.

«As part of Office 365 Advance Message Encryption, we are extending the email revocation capabilities to the end-user,» Microsoft explains. «Previously, you had to be an admin to revoke an already sent message; with this update, end users will have this capability as well.»

Once an email is revoked, recipients will receive an error stating «The message has been revoked by the sender» when they attempt to access the encrypted message.

The feature, which will help companies to prevent leaks and enterprise data theft, will be available to users whose business is signed up to an Office 365 subscription with Advanced Message Encryption. This is offered as part of Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 E5, Microsoft 365 E5 (Nonprofit Staff Pricing), Office 365 Enterprise E5 (Nonprofit Staff Pricing), and Office 365 Education A5.

As part of Microsoft’s wider efforts to improve its services as employees continue to work from home during the pandemic, the company also announced this week that it has started rolling out a new feature that will protect users from reply-all email storms. The Reply All Storm Protection tool for Office 365 will block subsequent replies to an email thread for four hours when it detects 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes.

Prior to that, the company upgraded its Microsoft Teams collaboration platform to support up to nine people in participant view, and also made its the Yammer Communities app available in Teams.