We ran into the oddest scenario when trying to just apply an Office 365 Online Archiving Retention Tag to just the Deleted Items folder. The customer has about 5 years of history in the Deleted Items folder and he was very diligent about cleaning up his inbox and so nothing needed to be archived except his Deleted Items folder – in this case he didn’t want his Deleted Items just permanently deleted.
In Sept 2022 we created an Archiving Policy for this mailbox and then we created and applied a “personal” retention tag of 2 years to the Deleted Items folder – but nothing happened.
We ended up escalating this to Microsoft Office 365 support and they were also stumped after extensive troubleshooting as nothing would work. They eventually were able to escalate this and get an answer from a developer on the subject 11/18/22 – the below from Microsoft sounds very confusing, we had a conversation with them too and we will properly explain what this means below Microsoft’s response, I just wanted to give you what their explanation was in writing:
“As discussed, below is effective for the Deleted Items folder.
Say email was received on Jan-1, 2021 in the mailbox, you created a ‘1 year move to archive’ Retention Policy/Tag for the Deleted Items folder in mailbox on December-1, 2021. The effective start date to count 1 year from will be December-1 and not January-1. Thus, the email that was anticipated to be archived by January-2, 2022 will actually be archived by December-2, 2022.
The above scenario is effective for your concern and thus we see the scheduled retention date in 2024 even though the current emails are already 2 years old from date when received/created in mailbox.
We would suggest you remove existing tags on deleted items for 2 years to archive and set the retention tag for 7 Days or 10 perhaps to ensure that Deleted Items folder does not fill up to it’s quota causing other problems in mailbox with email send/receive.Once, this is done, you may later set the retention tag to 2 years or 1 year to Archive that will continue to work.”
We specifically asked for a KB article describing this and their response was:
“There is no documentation published for this as this is an expected design behavior. Additionally, it is not feasible for the developer to send an email on the same. However, you may take my word for the recommendation as I have provided the information after investigating this behavior with my team.”
Normally for all Outlook folders except the Deleted Items folder, Archiving Policies use the date the email was received. For example, that date is January 1st, 2022, if you set up an Archive Policy and apply a 1 Year Retention Tag for emails 365 days or older to move to the Online Archive, any emails from January 1st, 2021 and older will move to the Archive folder.
However, for the Deleted Items folder archiving works differently. Instead of using the date that the email was received, the Deleted Items folder will first use the date the archiving policy was applied to the Deleted Items folder. For example, if you created and applied the Archive Policy on January 1st, 2022, and a Retention Tag of 365 days or older, emails will not start archiving until January 1st, 2023. At that point, anything 365 days or older will be archived!
So in our scenario we applied the Archiving Policy in September 1st, 2022 for the first time and then applied a 2 year Retention Tag to the deleted items folder. Microsoft support and the developer are stating that the archiving will not start for 2 years – September 1st, 2024, we would have to wait for 2 years before the Retention Tag will actually start archiving! Basically stating:
- When applying a Retention Tag to the Deleted Item Folder, the time period defined by the retention tag is when it will start archiving in the future from when the Archive Policy was applied to the mailbox. So for a 1 year retention tag, it will start archiving in 1 year after the Archive Policy was applied.
- Essentially your Retention Tag not only defines how long you’d like to retain your emails, but it also defines how long you have to wait for it to start working.
- And it will also use that Retention Tag time period to determine how far it will archive back, just like standard archiving.
This is so convoluted and backwards, I truly don’t understand why they had to make it so confusing. Essentially with no KB article from Microsoft to back this up, no one could really figure this out.
In our example we eventually set a Retention Tag for 2 months in November instead of 2 years and because our “wait” time after applying the Archive Policy In September was more than 2 months, it started to work and archived everything older than 2 months.
WORKAROUND:
One workaround to this could be to apply Archive Policies to a mailbox as soon as you create it, it doesn’t have to do anything at that time, i.e. no default Retention Tags or personally applied Tags. But because it is applied, the clock has started. That way you could have an Archive Policy applied and if 3 years later you wanted to actually apply a retention tag to the deleted items folder for 2 years or so, it would immediately take effect without the convoluted “wait” time.
FURTHER EXAMPLE:
Your Deleted Items folder contains emails from 2019-2022.
You create a policy on January 1st, 2022, for everything older than 1 year to move to the archive. On January 1st, 2023, the policy takes effect and all your emails from 2019-2021 would move to the archive folder. But all emails from January 2nd, 2022, to December 31st, 2022, would remain in your regular Deleted Items folder. Going forward, on January 2nd, 2023, the emails from January 2nd, 2022 would go to the Archive folder, then on January 3rd, 2023, the emails from January 3rd 2022 would go to the Archive folder, and so on.
FORCE ONLINE ARCHIVING TO START:
Because Online Archiving can take up to 24 hours to start, and I’ve normally seen it run on some schedule in the middle of the night, you can use the following command to force it to run immediately:
Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity EMAIL@ADDRESS.COM -FullCrawl
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