Enable or disable a classification label

Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Starter and Frontline Standard; Business Standard and Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus; Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; G Suite Business. Compare your edition

As an administrator, you control which classification labels are available to apply to files your organization owns in Drive and messages sent in Gmail by users in your organization.

When a label is enabled for Drive:

• Users with edit access to a file can apply published labels and edit the field values for those labels.
• Users with view access to a file can view labels applied to the file, but not apply labels or edit field values.
• Users with any access to a file can search Drive by labels or fields.

When a label is enabled for Gmail:

• Users with view and apply permission for the label can apply classification labels to emails when they compose them.

Enable or disable a classification label

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  SecurityAccess and data controlLabel manager.
3. Click the label you want to manage.
4. In the Applications section, check or uncheck the box next to the app you want to use the label in. You can use a label in only Drive, only Gmail, or both.

   Note:

   1. You can’t disable a label for Drive if it’s used by a Vault retention rule, default classification rule, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rule, or in AI classification.
   2. You can't disable a label for Gmail if it's used by a DLP rule.
   3. Gmail doesn’t support all the field types that Drive does. To determine if an existing label will meet your needs for Gmail, in the Preview pane, select Gmail and review the available fields. If a label is enabled for both Gmail and Drive and has fields supported for Drive only, users can see the label in Gmail but not the unsupported fields.
5. Confirm your change.

Changes can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly. Learn more

What happens when you disable labels

If you disable a label:

• The labels and its fields are hidden and can’t be created, applied to new files or messages, used for search, used for default classification, or used for AI classification. You can still edit the label in your Admin console.
• If you turn the label back on, it's usable again. Any field values that were set for a file or message before the label was disabled are restored.