Office 365 Retention Policies

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

Anyone had any luck modifying modifying retention policies on Office 365?

 

I want to set our policy so that items in Deleted Items delete after 30 days.

 

I've added a tag to the policy to just this, and having waited 30 days the email in Deleted Items now show as expired, but haven't deleted (!).

 

Microsoft have suggested changing the default policy name, but this hasn't worked. They've also suggested creating another policy and applying that, which I haven't done yet, but the default policy seems to be working, just not deleting.

 

Thanks

[robyholmes]

We were told it wouldn't delete them if there was a large amount. So to get around this we created a policy which would deleter after 3 years, leave for 1 month then change to 2.5 years.. etc. Took a while and some accounts were still to large to clean but we're now down to 30 days.

[DavePa]

Unfortunately some of our users still treat 'Deleted Items' (Bit of a clue in the name!) as a storage area so for the moment we don't force a delete. As we all get 50gb mailboxes now though is this actually a problem other than for housekeeping reasons? I remember working with Exchange when the *site* limit was something like 17gb and there was a registry key that you could alter to make it something like 60gb so 50gb each seems enormous at the moment!

[Gongalong]

@robyholmes Theoretically there isn't a large amount, at least for my mailbox, as I deleted everything way ahead of the tag kicking in. I am talking to Microsoft about it, as they emailed me following on from a post on their support boards, but so far all their suggestions (changed default policy name, add a separate tag) have failed to work. Worryingly I can see posts about this same issue with Exchange dating from 2010...

 

@DavePa For Data Protection reasons. We've told staff to delete emails that relate to students who have left. Of course if they delete emails they just go to deleted items, and I was trying to get around the whole rigmarole of explaining to staff about how to completely remove emails from their mailboxes. In theory tags look so simple, but it seems in practice they just don't work.