Patent ID: 8099759

Claim:
A method of determining a security encoding to be applied to a message being sent from a computing device to at least one recipient, the method comprising: determining, at the computing device, whether a general message encoding configuration setting thereon indicates that the security encoding to be applied to the message is to be established by a policy engine; if the general message encoding configuration setting on the computing device indicates that the security encoding to be applied to the message is to be established by the policy engine, determining the security encoding to be applied to the message by querying the policy engine for the security encoding to be applied to the message; determining the security encoding to be applied to the message in accordance with a user-selected security encoding only if the general message encoding configuration setting on the computing device does not indicate that the security encoding to be applied to the message is to be established by the policy engine; applying the determined security encoding to the message; and transmitting the message, to which the security encoding has been applied, to the at least one recipient.