Microsoft has changed their Exchange Server hosting (under the Office 365 banner) to allow for longer holding of Deleted Items up to ‘forever’.
Until now, Office 365 hosting had a fixed 30 days for Deleted Items retention. Any item in the Deleted Items folder older than 30 days was automatically removed and wasn’t directly visible in Outlook.
That might seem like enough but for many organizations it’s not. Some have data retention policies that require all communications, even deleted ones, be kept for a specified period. Some law suits might require handing over all messages on a particular topic, regardless of the date. Network administrators don’t want to make their boss angry when he/she can’t find the message from 35 days ago.
This change in Office 365 hosting does NOT affect the ‘Recoverable Items’ folder which contains ‘permanently’ deleted items which can’t be viewed in standard Outlook folders but are still retained on the Exchange Server.
The Microsoft blog has details on how to change the Default MRM Policy among the Retention Policies available to Office 365 Exchange admins.
If you do nothing the default retention period will be automatically changed to ‘indefinite’, meaning that Deleted Items are kept forever or until the user deletes them manually.
To change the new default, open the ‘Default MRM Policy’, change the setting and (this is vital) save it with a new policy name.
We suggest a long retention period like a year or more. That gives users plenty of time to find older deleted items but still allows for eventual automatic removal.
The same feature is already available to Exchange Server admins hosting elsewhere in in-house.
