What are you using / doing to make it easy to mark an email as "keep outside of retention limits"?

[pete]

Handy Outlook/OWA integrated button/tool that punts it somewhere with a longer retention?

 

Making it easy to apply retention labels in email?

 

Some other archiving routine?

 

We need to do something and SLT (trust and school level) are the worst offenders for "most likely to have the only copy of an important document/email chain in their mailboxes".

 

cheers

 

Pete

[robintech]

Online archive policy of any email older than X years gets moved there , for the free 50GB extra space. Power users might create a folder where emails inherit the archiving policy so they can makes sure it never gets deleted or moved.  Otherwise I don't think many if any apply tags to their emails by hand. 

 

Need to make a policy to delete emails from the archive after X years as well

[George_ARO]

This'd typically be handled with your email archiver - We implement Barracuda Archiver for our Edu customers (other archivers are available😆) - you can set custom retention policies based on search criteria (contains PO number, payment details, is a specific user etc.) which overrides the standard retention policy. I imagine other vendors would have this feature too.

 

If senior users struggle with this already, it's unlikely they'd start using a button reliably. 

Edited July 30, 2025 by George_ARO

[TechMonkey]

We have archive set to 14 months for everyone.  Standard staff have another 14 months before it is deleted.  SLT and key staff have 4 years in Archive.  If it is something that is wanted longer than that then it has to be taken out of email and stored in an actual file system.  Email is not a file system.

Depends on what it is as to where it goes.  Personal reference should go into OneDrive, information for Department goes into departmental SharePoint, pupil information should be logged against their MIS record, financial info should be logged against the appropriate finance system record, etc etc.

 

We considered having a label to keep for longer or never deleting, but knew the usual suspects would just mark everything as that to try and keep everything.  We made the conscious decision to push using proper filing systems.