Redact Email Addresses from Text
Automatically find and redact email addresses from logs, support tickets, and documents. Protect personally identifiable information (PII) and comply with privacy regulations.
Detailed Explanation
Redacting Email Addresses
Email addresses are personally identifiable information (PII) that must be handled carefully under privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Redacting emails from shared text protects user privacy and helps organizations maintain compliance.
Email Address Detection
Email addresses follow the RFC 5322 standard, but practical detection uses a simplified pattern:
[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}
This catches the vast majority of real-world email addresses while avoiding false positives from strings like user@localhost or version numbers.
Where Emails Appear Unexpectedly
- Application logs — User login attempts, registration events, password resets
- Error reports — Stack traces containing user context
- Database dumps — CSV exports, JSON data extracts
- Support ticket content — Forwarded messages with customer emails
- Git commit history — Author emails in
git logoutput - API responses — User profile data in JSON payloads
# Before redaction
2024-01-15 10:23:45 INFO User john.doe@example.com logged in from 192.168.1.100
2024-01-15 10:24:12 ERROR Failed password reset for alice.smith@company.org
Contact: support@internal.dev, cc: manager@internal.dev
# After redaction
2024-01-15 10:23:45 INFO User [REDACTED_EMAIL] logged in from 192.168.1.100
2024-01-15 10:24:12 ERROR Failed password reset for [REDACTED_EMAIL]
Contact: [REDACTED_EMAIL], cc: [REDACTED_EMAIL]
Redaction vs. Anonymization
Redaction replaces the email with a placeholder like [REDACTED_EMAIL]. Anonymization replaces it with a consistent hash so that the same email always produces the same token (useful for analytics). The Secret Redactor performs full redaction, which is the safer approach for sharing text externally.
Privacy Regulation Compliance
Under GDPR, email addresses are considered personal data. Sharing logs or documents containing email addresses without redaction can constitute a data breach. The Secret Redactor helps enforce data minimization by removing PII before text leaves a secure environment.
Partial Redaction Options
Some use cases require preserving the domain while redacting the local part: [REDACTED]@example.com. This is useful when the domain itself is not sensitive but the individual identity is.
Use Case
A support team lead is compiling a monthly report of common support issues and needs to include representative log excerpts. The logs contain customer email addresses. Running the logs through the Secret Redactor replaces all email addresses with placeholders, allowing the report to be shared with management and the engineering team without exposing customer PII.