Retention of e-mail messages?

[JBruyet]

Hey all,

I recently installed XS2k and I'm loving it. However, I was just asked yesterday where the deleted e-mails are kept and I said that once they're deleted they're gone. I was then advised that since we're a public entity even our deleted e-mails are subject to discovery by the public. So, any ideas on how to keep copies of all the e-mails even after they've been deleted?

Thanks,

Joe Brouillette

 

[jonwilliams]

The option you’re looking for is deleted item retention. When this it turned on, all user deleted email is kept on the server for the specified retention time. You can configure this setting by going to the properties of the information store, the “limits” tab, and then to the “Deletion Settings”. Set the “Keep deleted items for (days)” to the number of days you’d like to keep the messages before they are purged from the store (most set this to 14 – 30 days). You can also specify the time frame a mailbox will be kept before it’s deleted from the store from this section as well (usually around 30 – 60). Setting either of these options to “0” will disable the option. The last option “Do not permanently delete…” in your case is probably the most important setting of all (as long as the other two are enabled). With this, and a good backup archive policy, you should be able to restore any email your company receives . This setting does exactly what is says, the server will not delete the items until the store is backed up.

Once these setting are enabled, your users can recover deleted items from outlook. By default, you’ll only be able to recover items deleted from the “Deleted Items” folder. However, if you add the following to the registry of your workstations, you’ll be able to recover from any folder in the mailbox.

DWORD value DumpsterAlwaysOn=1 to the following registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

Though keep in mind, the longer you set the deleted items time, the bigger your store will get. I hope this answers your question.

Good Luck,
Jon

 

[JBruyet]

Sounds like just what I'm looking for!

Thanks,

Joe Brouillette