Microsoft Office 365 – Retention Policy Not Being Applied

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So in my org we are fully O365/EXO, and my job this week was to setup retention tags and assign a policy to a support inbox. This inbox just forwards to Salesforce so nothings critical.
so I setup two tags: 3 months to archive, and 6 month delete from archive.

retention_policy

I created a Retention Policy called Support Inbox, and applied it to the mailbox via ExchangeOnline web gui.

Now I have been out of the EXO game for a couple years but remembering on-prem I recall you could force that policy to be applied immediately by starting/restarting the Mailbox Agent. I think that's true to EXO as well.

So checking the available tags, all default tags were an option. I waited overnight after assigning the new Support Inbox policy and when I rechecked what's available in the mailbox itself now there were zero tags.
enter image description here

So yesterday I removed, and reapplied the Support policy then waited until his morning but the result is the same. The I have no tag's available.

So I'm sitting here trying to figure out what happened, so I hope someone here has some advice.

Best Answer

I have done a test in my lab, applied a retention policy to a mailbox and run Start-ManagedFolderAssistant, I can see the policy in folder, look like below: enter image description here

It proves that I have applied the policy successfully.

In addition, I have found article, in which mentions that Don’t forget that the MFA in Exchange Online runs on a seven-day work cycle, so you can expect some delay here. For more details: Exchange Retention and Communication Compliance Updates