Hey folks,
Looking to gather some insight on your email retention policies.
Can you answer the following…
What platform are you on? (Exchange cloud, Exchange on prem, Google, etc)
How long are items kept in your users Sent folder
How long are items kept in your users Trash/Deleted folder
How long are items kept in your users Archive folder (I’m assuming these stay around forever but curious if you have a unique policy on the folder)
How long are items kept in your users user created mailbox folder (I’m assuming these stay around forever but curious if you have a unique policy on the folder(s)
How often do you back up email?
How far back do you keep your email backups?
Feel free to chime in with other scenarios in regards to your retention policy,
Keep it long enough to meet legal or compliance requirements but short enough to limit negative legal and reputation consequences (e.g. data loss or leaks)
Office365 makes it easy to apply different retention policies for different departments. Finance might have to keep data longer) 3 years might be a good starting point for discussions.
We too are trying to figure this out. Aside from the policy, what options are there for you if you are using Office 365 for email to backup or archive email? What are people using and are you applying different policies to different people or departments?
It does depend on what type of system you are using (Office 365 vs. On-prem) but we keep emails indefinitely. You never know when a user wants X email from 2 years ago.
So, we use an email archive solution called MailStore https://www.mailstore.com/
We have it auto-archive all emails over 6 months old. Doesn’t matter what folder it’s in.
If they need email older than 6 months, they just open the mailstore web interface and pull it up that way.
Works fast and smooth. We have emails archived back to 2004.