Exchange 2010 retention polices

[Jobos]

I'm setting up the retention policies to empty the deleted and junk folders after 14 days and was wondering what policies other schools use. I was with a user yesterday and they had 512 unread emails in their inbox spanning 6 years so a pollicy to delete unread emails say after 90 days might be useful in this situation and as teachers tend to email files to colleagues their sent folder can soon grow so perhaps a policy to clean up the sent folder would be useful as well.

[foofighterjim]

Nowhere near as comprehensive as you but I just had it set to delete from the deleted items after 30 days and the restore period set to 7 days. I would never consider removing unread items from an inbox as who am I to say what is and isn't important. The best way around this is to set your user quotas and educate your staff on best practice. Bad practice will mean the user hits their quota limit and then they will have to do something about it.

[pete]

I'm setting up the retention policies to empty the deleted and junk folders after 14 days and was wondering what policies other schools use. I was with a user yesterday and they had 512 unread emails in their inbox spanning 6 years so a pollicy to delete unread emails say after 90 days might be useful in this situation and as teachers tend to email files to colleagues their sent folder can soon grow so perhaps a policy to clean up the sent folder would be useful as well.

 

*grabs popcorn*

 

(To elaborate, a significant percentage of your end-users will be using the deleted items folder to store important stuff. Even if they deny it.)

 

We retain stuff by default for 14 days after someone empties their deleted items and longer (up to 180 days) if they perform a role where that's useful to have. We don't empty deleted items.

 

However, we don't have a problem with stupidly large mailboxes here - I think we've maybe 10 with ~2GB, the rest are well below 300MB.

[Jobos]

I've been deleting the deleted items for 5 years at my schools and everyone is aware and ok with it. I started doing this because I was finding users had deleted items that had been there since exchange arrived at the school and the bin had never been emptied. Users just don't care how much resources they use and a good example would be the user who had the 512 unread emails. If the emails had been of any value they would have at least been opened.

 

I'm at a small primary school today and looking at the mailbox sizes I can see 25% of users have over 1GB and the office manager who has 3.4GB.

[foofighterjim]

I've been deleting the deleted items for 5 years at my schools and everyone is aware and ok with it. I started doing this because I was finding users had deleted items that had been there since exchange arrived at the school and the bin had never been emptied. Users just don't care how much resources they use and a good example would be the user who had the 512 unread emails. If the emails had been of any value they would have at least been opened.

 

I'm at a small primary school today and looking at the mailbox sizes I can see 25% of users have over 1GB and the office manager who has 3.4GB.

 

I'm sorry but that is purely down to staff culture. Tight quotas that force users to become conscious of the space they are using are (in my opinion) your best way forward. I do agree that those 512 unread emails probably aren't needed but are you the one that dictates that? If you take the quota route they will arrive at these conclusions by themselves.

[robjduk]

For teachers I delete sent after 1 year and deleted after 30 days. I may add that delete unread rule though (good idea).

[Michael]

I've been deleting the deleted items for 5 years at my schools and everyone is aware and ok with it. I started doing this because I was finding users had deleted items that had been there since exchange arrived at the school and the bin had never been emptied. Users just don't care how much resources they use and a good example would be the user who had the 512 unread emails. If the emails had been of any value they would have at least been opened.

 

I'm at a small primary school today and looking at the mailbox sizes I can see 25% of users have over 1GB and the office manager who has 3.4GB.

 

I appreciate it's not a quick fix, but migrating to Office 365 (now based on Exchange 2013), offers all users 25GB mailboxes. Deleting e-mails will unlikely ever be a problem as Microsoft will no doubt increase mailbox sizes over time.

[sukh]

I appreciate it's not a quick fix, but migrating to Office 365 (now based on Exchange 2013), offers all users 25GB mailboxes. Deleting e-mails will unlikely ever be a problem as Microsoft will no doubt increase mailbox sizes over time.

 

already increased to 50GB.

[DMcCoy]

I retained deleted items and mailboxes for a year. Do make sure mail is kept long enough to be archived on something, some regulations still apply to email for retention.