System and methods for the implementation and/or enforcement of an email policy for an organization's email system are presented. A Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy may be implemented on top of the email system. In one embodiment, the DLP policy may comprise modules and/or processing that tests emails for such sensitive data within emails. If an email comprises such sensitive data, then the DLP policy directives may specify processing to be applied as part of each stage of mail processing, from authoring to mail processing on the server and delivery. A single policy may be authored and managed that will apply the policy directives uniformly across all aspects of the message lifecycle. Each of the message policy enforcement systems may evaluate the single policy definition and apply the policy directives in a manner consistent with the contextual evaluation of the policy.