Overview

This article outlines how to create a new Email Retention Policy.

Retention Policies define the length of time that an archived email is retained in the Archive Store before it is deleted. For example, you can configure GFI Archiver to retain emails marked ‘Sales’ for two years while keeping emails marked as ‘Legal’ indefinitely. This also allows administrators to set rules to delete emails older than a certain age. 

Solution

To create a new email retention policy, follow these steps:

1. Open the GFI Archiver web page.
2. Select the Configuration tab and from Overview of current settings, click Retention and Spam Policies label.
3. Click Add.
4. From the Retention Policy wizard, select Email Retention Policy and click Next.
   
   
5. In the Retention Policy Details screen, key in the details for the new retention policy and click Next. Available options are:
   • Policy name: Defines the name for the new policy to be created.
   • Email criteria: Defines the conditions that will identify an email as being part of this retention policy. Select Subject, Body, Sender or Recipient from the drop-down list and provide the values which an email must match to fall under this retention policy. Click + to add more and - to delete a keyed in condition.
   • Enable Policy: Defines whether a policy is in effect or not and if emails are to be deleted immediately or retained for a specific amount of time. Select Enable Policy and select an option between: Do NOT retain emails matching above conditions, delete immediately or Do NOT retain emails matching the above conditions, delete after x days.
     Note: To configure a number of years, specify the number of days. For example, to retain emails for 2 years, key in 730 days and to retain emails for 5 years, key in 1825 days.
     
     
6. Click Finish.

Creating a Retention Policy to retain all emails

An example where a retention policy that matches all emails becomes useful is when you want to keep all financial emails for 5 years, all administrative emails for 2 years, and all sales emails for 1 year, but you want to delete all other emails to keep the archive store size under control. In this scenario, you would do the following steps:

Important: Use the information outlined in this section with great care. If you configure a match all emails retention policy and assign it the wrong priority, you could end up with GFI Archiver deleting all emails from the configured archive stores.

1. Create email retention policies for Financial Emails, Administrative Emails and Sales Emails with the action set to delete after 5, 2 and 1 year respectively.
2. During step 5 of the process described above, specify either one of the following conditions to create a retention policy that matches all emails:
   • * in the subject
   • * in the body
   • *@* in the sender or recipient list.
3. Arrange the priorities of the retention policies as required, but always give the match all emails retention policy the lowest priority.
4. Click Save Settings.

Note: Only emails archived after this retention policy comes into effect that match this policy will get assigned to it, unless the retroactive retention run.

Testing

After creating a Retention policy a Retroactive Retention can be run by following the steps below. 

To run retroactive retention:

1. Click Run Retroactive.

2. In the Archive Store field, select the archive stores on which Retroactive retention will run.

3. Click Add.

4. Click Run Retroactive.

5. Use the Summary for retroactive retention to monitor the progress of the running process.

6. Click Pause Retroactive to pause the current job or Stop Retroactive to cancel.