Would you like to learn how to use a group policy to configure Microsoft Defender Antivirus to analyze the mail bodies and attachments and scans them for malicious content? In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a group policy to enable email scanning.
• Windows 2012 R2
• Windows 2016
• Windows 2019
• Windows 2022
• Windows 10
• Windows 11
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Tutorial GPO Defender – Enable email scanning
On the domain controller, open the group policy management tool.
Create a new group policy.
Enter a name for the new group policy.
In our example, the new GPO was named: MY-GPO.
On the Group Policy Management screen, expand the folder named Group Policy Objects.
Right-click your new Group Policy Object and select the Edit option.
On the group policy editor screen, expand the Computer configuration folder and locate the following item.
Access the folder named Scan.
Enable the item named Turn on e-mail scanning.
Ensure that Microsoft Defender Antivirus with Real-Time Protection is enabled.
To save the group policy configuration, you need to close the Group Policy editor.
Congratulations! You have finished the GPO creation.
Tutorial GPO – Enable email scanning
On the Group policy management screen, you need to right-click the Organizational Unit desired and select the option to link an existent GPO.
In our example, we are going to link the group policy named MY-GPO to the root of the domain.
After applying the GPO you need to wait for 10 or 20 minutes.
During this time the GPO will be replicated to other domain controllers.
In our example, we enabled the email scanning feature of Windows Defender using a GPO.
