Indexing of Smart Attachments
Generally, Smart Attachments (or any attachment for that matter) were not indexed (scanned by search engines) if a bit of embedded text (robots.txt) was included (more information can be found here).
In September of 2023, Google began to deprecate this process, and announced that an X-Robots-Tag must be present in the header instead. Any message that did not contain this new header will have any attachments indexed and can show up in Google search results.
What to Do About It
PoliteMail versions after 5.05.3526 have been updated to automatically insert the necessary header to prevent Smart Attachments from being indexed.
PoliteMail versions 5.05.3526 and earlier should either be updated to the latest version to have the header automatically applied, or the X-Robots-Tag header will need to be set to prevent indexing. This can be configured by adding the header in IIS.
Is this a Security Issue?
No. If your users are marking confidential attachments as Secure, then even though the file might show in a Google search result, unauthorized users will still be unable to access it.
That said, most PoliteMail users send Smart Attachments so recipients can view it in their email, and not from a search engine result, which is why this process is being put into place.
