Manage Licenses

Material lists every account in your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant. Only licensed accounts sync data, receive protections, and count toward your license usage.

You choose which accounts get a license. Use this page to understand how licenses are assigned, check which accounts are using one, and change who gets a license.

How licenses work

Licenses are an account setting, so they follow the same settings hierarchy as your other account settings. You can assign a license at the global, tenant, group, or account level, and each level inherits from the level above it unless you set a custom value.

Each account has two license settings:

Setting	Options	What it does
Material Essentials and Advanced	Essentials, Advanced, or None	Sets which Material features are available to the account. An account can have Essentials or Advanced, not both.
ATO Resilience	On or off	Adds features that detect, respond to, and mitigate account takeovers.

Options that aren't included in your contract may appear in the list but can't be selected.

The default license assignment

By default, the license you purchased is set in Default Account Settings at the Global level (or at the tenant level if you're on a shared instance). That means every account in your tenant gets a license automatically, including new accounts as they're created in Google or Microsoft. This ensures new accounts are protected without you having to take any action in Material.

To view your default license assignment:

1. From the top bar, click Settings, then click Default Account Settings.
2. Review the Licenses section.

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Review your license usage in Material

If your license usage is higher than you expect, start by finding the accounts that count toward your usage.

View a summary on the Usage page

1. From the top bar, click Settings, then click Usage.
2. Under Account Settings, review the How are licenses assigned? chart. Hover over a bar to see the number of accounts with each license.

Find the accounts that count toward your usage

To see the list of active accounts with a license:

1. From the left navigation, expand Explorer then click Accounts.
2. Confirm the Provider Status is Active filter is applied. Suspended, deleted, and archived accounts can show a license in Material, but they don't count toward your usage.
3. Add the filter Active Features > Licenses.

The account count displays on top

If you have more than one tenant, you can also see the number of licensed accounts in each tenant. From the left navigation, expand Explorer, then click Tenants, and review the Licensed Accounts column:

To compare your accounts in a spreadsheet, click Export as CSV after you apply your filters. Use the Connection column: Connected means the account has a license. You can export up to 20,000 accounts at a time. If you have more, apply filters to narrow the list, then export each set.

If needed, compare this list with the account lists in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

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Manage your license usage

Material protects more than email: it also covers file security, posture management, and account takeover detection. That's why accounts without a mailbox get a license by default. However, you can change this behavior.

Once you know which accounts are using a license, decide whether they all need protection.

Setting an account's license to None disconnects Material from that account entirely. If Sensitive Email Redaction or ATO Resilience is on for the account, restore its messages to the mailbox before you remove the license. If you don't, you can lose access to those messages.

Follow the steps in Off-board Users to remove a license safely.

If you don't need coverage for every account, you can change who gets a license in a few ways:

Exclude accounts without a mailbox

In Settings, turn on Require mailbox for license assignment so Material only assigns a license to accounts that have a mailbox in Google or Microsoft. When it's on, accounts without a mailbox don't get a license, regardless of the Licensing settings.

Settings > Default Account Settings

Exclude accounts from receiving licenses using groups

Instead of assigning a license to every account, you can exclude members of specific groups.

To exclude the license per group:

1. Confirm your Global license is set to your preferred choice for defaults.
2. From the left navigation, expand Explorer then click Groups.
3. Select the group(s).
4. From the bottom toolbar (or using ⌘K), click Edit Group Settings.
5. Under Licenses, select Override then None
6. Click Save.

To manage licenses exclusively by adding them to groups, you can set your default license to none. However, assign the license to the group before you change your default to None. If you change the default first, accounts outside any licensed group lose their license and Material disconnects from them. Review how to remove a license safely first.

Assign licenses to accounts using groups

Instead of assigning a license to every account in the Default Account Settings, you can assign one only to accounts in designated groups.

To assign the license per group:

1. From the left navigation, expand Explorer then click Groups.
2. Select the group(s).
3. From the bottom toolbar (or using ⌘K), click Edit Group Settings.
4. Under Licenses, select Override then the license you want to apply to this group
5. Click Save.

1. Set the Global default setting to None. See the default license assignment above.

To manage licenses exclusively by adding them to groups, you can set your default license to none. However, assign the license to the group before you change your default to None. If you change the default first, accounts outside any licensed group lose their license and Material disconnects from them. Review how to remove a license safely first.

Remove the license from specific accounts

For a small set of accounts, such as a few shared mailboxes or service accounts, remove the license from each account directly.

1. From the left navigation, expand Explorer then click Accounts.
2. From the bottom toolbar (or using ⌘K), click Edit Settings.
3. Under Licenses, select Override Material Essentials and Advanced, then select None.
4. If the account has ATO Resilience, turn ATO Resilience off.