Understanding Retention Policies with multiple retention tags.

Question

As the title says, a very simple question.

Defining the scenario: Department has an archive enabled user mailbox that is about 10 years old. With the local archive practically holding junk since the org physically prints out and pins emails, the IT team decided to keep only emails that date back up to 5 years. They want it done using ECP Retention policies but they also want to keep the current 2 week to archive policy.

Environment: OnPremises Exchange Server 2016 CU23

Method used:
Created a retention tag that will delete emails that are older than 1825 days from a default folder assuming the "in-place <user> archive" is a default type.

Created a retention policy that contains the 2 week to archive retention tag and the 1825 days to delete retention tag.

Applied it to the user mailbox and ran MFA in the exchange server management shell.

Result: The 2 weeks policy works but the archive hasn't changed at all.

Now my question is, is it feasible to delete emails from an in-place archive using a retention policy?

If not, can the community share a few possible resolutions that can be used to automate the process and require a script that need be run every other time for individual users?

Answer 1

Hi,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A platform!

To work around this issue, right-click the folder in Outlook, click Properties, click the Policy tab, and then choose Use Parent Folder Policy.

You can refer to:Retention policy doesn't work on the In-Place Archive mailbox in Exchange Server

Please feel free to contact me for any updates. And if this helps, don't forget to mark it as an answer!

Answer 2

Yes, the configuration should work. A folder can have both an "archive" and "delete" tag, which combined with the fact that the same set of tags apply to the folder in the main mailbox and the archive one (i.e. Inbox in the archive will have the same tags as Inbox in the main mailbox) enables this behavior. The net effect should be that items gets moved to the archive in two weeks, then deleted from the archive after they reach the 1825 mark. The behavior is detailed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/messaging-records-management/retention-tags-and-policies#applying-a-retention-tag-to-a-folder-in-the-archive