We are running Exchange 2019 completely on-prem. Our default retention policy archives emails after two years to the user's Online Archive (it also cleans out some folders like deleted items, drafts, etc.). We are a Government entity with some requirements to ensure that all communications are kept for 10 years. So far we have just let Exchange archive the emails and never bothered to delete anything so users have emails going back decades in their archives. Needless to say, the archive DB is getting quite large (not huge – we're a small org) and I would like to add a retention tag to remove emails in the Online Archive that are older than 10 years. There isn't a tag the applies specifically to the Online Archive and from what I've read, that's because it should just be treated as an extension of the Inbox. I created another Default type tag to delete items more than 10 years old but this seems to override the existing Default tag that moves the items to the Online Archive to begin with.
How do I remove items just from the Online Archive after the 10 year mark?
Update:
I have both the "Archive after 2 years" and "Delete after 10 years" tags. However, when I look at all my emails they only say Delete after 10 years:
Best Answer
To me since the archive policy applies to both the primary mailbox and the archive mailbox, it is not possible to configure to only remove the old items in the archive mailbox.
While I suppose you should have ready created tags with action "Move to Archive" to automatically move items which reach a certain age (take 3 years for example) to the archive mailbox.
If you create another tag to delete items which reach 10 years old, the whole process would be like:
1.items in the primary mailbox reach 3 years old --> these items are moved to archive
2.these items in archive mailbox are kept for another 7 years (reach 10 years old) --> these items are deleted from the archive mailbox
Thus to me if you have an archive tag and a delete tag like this, it should work without problems.
You can have an archive tag and a delete tag co-existing at the same time, just make sure the archive age is shorter than the deletion age.
For example: