Prevent downloading attachments through OWA and Mobile Device

Created by Pooja Sharma, Modified on Thu, 10 Jun, 2021 at 11:41 AM by Pooja Sharma

1. Steps to disable the attachment download in OWA, it is very simple and only was needed some clicks into the Exchange Online admin center

First of all, access to the EXO admin center, go to permissions, Outlook Web App policies, then you have two options, or create a new policy or to modifiy the default, one. Whatever option you choose, the only change needed is to uncheck the “Direct file Access” checkbox

In case you create a new OWA policy and specify the following:

In case you create a new policy, remember to set the policy to a bunch of pilot(test) users to test it first, before setting the policy to the whole company

But If you want to do it by PowerShell, you can do it by executing the following (remember to connect to EXO by PS):

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -DirectFileAccessOnPublicComputersEnabled $false -DirectFileAccessOnPrivateComputersEnabled $false

Once this has been done, the user is not able to download the file, but he can edit the file into the Online version of Office, great isn´t it?

2. Block Attachment on mobile device

If you don’t want your users to download an attachment on their mobile device, then please run the below PowerShell command to check and disable

Get-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy

Set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy -Identity default -AttachmentsEnabled $false

Note:

Use the Set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy cmdlet to apply a variety of Mobile Device mailbox policy settings to a server. You can set any of the parameters by using one command. For more details check the below link:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-activesyncmailboxpolicy?view=exchange-ps

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