Email retention

[djrscally]

Emails will obviously contain a ton of personal data that needs to be kept within a retention period. We think that it's too much of an administrative burden for staff to be expected to manually clean an inbox however, so what we intended to do was an automatic rolling deletion such that emails would be automatically binned after 12 months. Where this is coming unstuck is in an easy method for staff to flag emails that they know need to be around for longer than that to be exempt from the rolling delete - we use O365 and Exchange and can't find anything except an "In Place Archive" that gets saved. This is quite annoying to use, particularly since the "Archive" button in Outlook doesn't actually send emails to this Archive.

 

How are you guys handling retention and emails?

[MartinT]

I've setup Exchange retention as follows:

 

Folders - 7 years (life of the student)

Inbox - 1 year

Sent items - 7 years

Deleted items - 7 days

 

It all happens automatically and the staff are well aware.

[djrscally]

I've setup Exchange retention as follows:

 

Folders - 7 years (life of the student)

Inbox - 1 year

Sent items - 7 years

Deleted items - 7 days

 

It all happens automatically and the staff are well aware.

 

By "Folders", you mean just the folders the User has set up? We must have missed something then - couldn't figure out how to do that!

[MartinT]

Yes, folders setup at the root of their mailbox (not under inbox) by the user in Outlook or OWA. Exchange has root folders as a selection for retention purposes.

[djrscally]

Yes, folders setup at the root of their mailbox (not under inbox) by the user in Outlook or OWA. Exchange has root folders as a selection for retention purposes.

 

Right - we'll explore that. That's really helpful, thank you.

[AliG]

Yes, folders setup at the root of their mailbox (not under inbox) by the user in Outlook or OWA. Exchange has root folders as a selection for retention purposes.

 

I was looking at this yesterday and couldn't see this in Exchange Online but I will take another look

[MartinT]

Exchange Online may be different. We have on-premises Exchange.

[GrumbleDook]

You can set up specific retention schedules and have the default one delete emails after x days/months/years ... If something needs to be kept for longer, then the member of staff selects the relative retention schedule. You can even have one called 'recorded' that members of staff can apply to an email once the information in it has been recorded in the relevant (and correct) place ... and have that set to delete after 7 days (the email is no longer needed, after all).

 

I have tried prodding MS a few times about explaining these features to schools but have had nothing back. I've spoken with a few MS Partners, who are happy to explain a bit more ... perhaps I should go and see what they can do.