disabling links in MS Outlook 2016 and / or Mail

[Louise_R]

Is this possible ?

At the request of our infosec group, they would like to know if there is a way to disable links from being clickable within MS outlook 2016.

They only way I’ve found via the google to do this is to force apple mail to display as plain text using the command:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

But this no longer seems to work.
Is there another way to do this, force all mail to display as plain text or disable links in Outlooks / Apple Mail ?

[walt]

ask infosec if they should also just disable the internet? (do they have web filtering? that should be enough to prevent most suspicious sites on their intranet/network)

sorry, but I'm genuinely curious on if there are ways for this, not to implement but how it would work and why other org's infosec or stakeholders request such things. I've experienced a lot of requests similar to this, but in the end communication with users and user education/responsible seemed to outweigh any hassle or wasted efforts on trying to restrict parameters that may be tougher to maintain or manage down the road.

[kbingham]

I have used Mimecast before to mask the URLs. The links work but they are redirected to Mimecast first to check for any known phishing sites or malicious code on the page.

[john_bio]

So what if someone does need to click a link in an e-mail?

Sounds like your trying to solve a people problem with technology...

[Louise_R]

john_bio yup, that is exactly the reason. There are some click happy people and info sec is trying to use technology to deal with a people problem.

walt the reasoning is as john_bio said they are looking into solving a people issue with technology. We have asked the question, they were not happy.

I have opened a support question with MS to see if we can do this on MS outlook, I'll update the thread if i hear anything.