Systems and methods for remotely operating a data protection server are described. The data protection server is configured to perform predefined data protection operations for computing assets of an enterprise network. An email agent is installed on the data protection system to receive a specially-coded email message from an authorized user, where the specially-coded message includes an instruction for performing a predefined data protection operation. Upon receiving the email message and parsing it to extract the instruction, the data protection system initiates execution of the instruction.