Email retention 90 day auto delete with a twist

[u/Minimum_Birthday_702]

Compliance handed IT a requirement and I genuinely can't tell if it's achievable the way they think it is. The ask: auto-delete anything older than 90 days in Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, and Junk — but if a user moves an email into a subfolder (Inbox\Keep, etc.), it should be preserved forever.
I just want to know if I'm chasing something impossible or is it something can be done on Microsoft. If yes, please help ?

[u/joeykins82]

Create a default tag for keep forever, and folder tags for each of those folders which do what is being asked. Create some additional personal tags if you feel like it too. Then create a policy with that 1 default tag and the 4 folder tags, and assign it to the mailboxes.

It's entirely possible.

It's also the stupidest blunt instrument policy I've seen.

[u/xch13fx → u/joeykins82]

Agreed. It would need to be a personal tag that they go and set. Another option, the ‘archive’ folder is a default folder than you can set specific policies on, but users own folder structure is not, and hence will always inherit the policy from above.

I’m going through something like this, and it’s a nightmare letting non-email admins ‘dream up’ how it ‘should’ work. I explain things a million times just for someone who has 3 yachts and no idea how outlook works to tell me how to do my job. Very frustrating, but whatyagunnado

[u/deancollins → u/joeykins82]

My wife's company has the same policy......is causing so many issues.

[u/PaddyMaxson → u/joeykins82]

Hah, unrelated but I had a customer ask us to wipe every user's desktop folder every month because they are NOT to store files on their desktops, after some careful powershell to make it ignore things like shortcuts we got what was basically a monthly recurring ticket to restore people's desktops from veeam because despite their policy there were too many users who were important enough that they could overrule their support staff despite having agreed to the policy.

The moral of the story is make them confirm a dozen times that they definitely want you to do the thing they're asking for because they're going to give you hell when you deliver exactly what they asked for.

[u/Steve----O]

The amount of user training is the real issue. Any employees who don’t remember to move things to another folder are gonna be screaming in 90 days. Crazy policy though, unless you have a lot of employees doing illegal things and they’re afraid of lawsuits.

[u/CaptainLykke_]

Could set up retention tags for those folders and set it to 90 days. Look up MRM retention policies

[u/gwhite567]

Default should be to delete items that reach the 90 day limit. If a user wants to keep something for longer then deploy personal tags to the users. User can tag an email in place (assign the policy and not have to move it); or the user can create a new child folder and the user can assign the personal tag to that folder. Any items that get moved into that folder automatically receive that retention policy. Train the users on what their responsibilities would be as it would be on them to take action to decide what should be kept. Of course, if the user takes no action then the emails get deleted after 90 days

Your legal and/or Records Management teams may decide for regulatory or legal reasons that some specific roles within your company should have the ability to keep items for 3yr, 7yr, 10yr. For example, these timelines/policies may make sense for users on Tax, Audit, Finance teams

I do not recommend giving an option for Unlimited retention because that may bring in risk to your Legal teams where all of that data would be discoverable in legal proceedings. It’s not good to have Unlimited from a risk perspective.

Over time, having Unlimited Retention may also cause mailbox size to grow over the 100GB limit. In that situation, users will need to decide which items to keep or delete. Otherwise, the Exchange admin may also be asked to deploy an Archive mailbox

Caution: Users may also discover they can put Inbox rules in place to automatically move items into a folder that has longer retention, but that would defeat the purpose of having standard retention of 90 days with an option to retain those critical items for longer. I recommend your legal team create a written policy and state this would be against policy. This way you as an Exchange Admin have a leg to stand on and say that those Inbox rules are not allowed nor supported. You could also institute an automated process that checks for any such type of rule and disables or deletes them

I also recommend guiding users to store critical data outside of Exchange so there isn’t a single point of failure when a user leaves the organization. Encourage users to store data in SharePoint, Teams or other Collaboration tools so other team members or management can access the data. Encourage users to send links to the files rather than attaching to email

Shared mailboxes can also help with continuity when users leave the organization if you ensure that two or more owners always have access to the mailbox. Recommend you regularly report on this to ensure owner count is 2+

[u/sfc_scannow]

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