Overview

This article answers the query: Why are emails not deleted instantly after running Retroactive Retention?

Information

• The Retroactive Retention job does not instantly delete emails. It evaluates each email against the current set of retention policies and assigns a policy accordingly. The deletion occurs via the daily maintenance job which runs automatically (usually starting at 11 pm). 
  
  
• Emails will be effectively removed once the first maintenance job completes after Retroactive Retention was run.  Consider the following timeline example:
  
  
  1. 09:00 am - User create a new retention policy to delete emails immediately containing the text '[PRIVATE]' in the subject.
  2. 09:05 am - User starts Retroactive Retention.
  3. 11:00 am - The Retroactive Retention job completes
     • Please note, no email has been deleted via Retroactive Retention at this point.
  4. 11:00 pm - The daily maintenance job starts and processes emails which are due to be deleted.