Oct 09 2015

Exchange Default Retention Policy Does Not Apply

Published by at 1:35 pm under Exchange

You have configured in Exchange EAC (Exchange Admin Center) or with Powershell a retention policy that is supposed to clean up your deleted items for instance. But it does not apply to your mailboxes, nothing gets deleted.
 
As suggested on Microsoft, the default policy is applied when you create an archive for the mailbox. But you’re unlucky: the archive feature in Exchange 2010 and 2013 requires an enterprise Client Access License (CAL) or a Microsoft Office Professional Plus product and you did not subscribe to that option you could not afford.
 
All is not lost!
You’re still able to create your own retention policy that you can apply to all of your mailboxes quite easily.
To do so, navigate to:
– Compliance Management
– Retention Tags and then
– Retention Policy, to create your own rules.

You can then apply the new policy, directly into your mailbox properties.
To avoid spending some extra time in this or forgetting some mailboxes, you can automate the process to all within a powershell script. You can then schedule the script every weekend if you wish.
 

add-pssnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.SnapIn

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize unlimited | 
Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy "My Retention Policy"

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails SharedMailbox -ResultSize unlimited | 
Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy "My Retention Policy"

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize unlimited | 
Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails SharedMailbox -ResultSize unlimited | 

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

 
The last command “Start-ManagedFolderAssistant” is not mandatory, but it lets you process mailboxes immediately.


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