How to Set Default Email Retention Policy in Exchange 2010 & 2013

In today’s business world, email is the most important medium of communication. So, to have the communication with employees with an organization, MS Exchange is required. It offers a kind of digital communication with employees. It offers many features to the make users experience easy. One such feature is Retention policy.

Retention policy is basically a part of MRM (messaging record management) which is available with MS Exchange 2010 & 2013. It makes easy to keep the messages, which are required to satisfy according to organization policy, need and remove a content which has a business as well as legal values. It is a collection of tags which are applied to the mailboxes accordingly. User can only have one of the retention policy at time but can have more than one retention tags. There are mainly three types of retention tags – Retention Policy Tag, Default Policy tag and Personal tags. There is no any difference in between the Exchange 2010 and 2013 retention policies except configuration part. Therefore, we describe the procedure for both Exchange 2010 & 2013 separately.

Prerequisites

Before starting with the procedure to set the default email retention policy, user must keep the mentioned points in mind:

• Retention policy with the same name does not exist in the Exchange organization.
• User can add one or more tags to the new retention policy

Process to Set Default Email Retention

By following the steps given below user can easily set the default email retention in Exchange 2010 and 2013. In both the Exchange 2010 and 2013, there is only difference in configuration.

For Exchange 2010:

• Open the Exchange Admin Center in your machine. Then go to Organization Configuration option and select Mailbox.
• Choose the New Retention Policy.
• Now a screen will appear, type the name and click on add button to add the retention tags.
• Choose Mailboxes page and click on add to which user wants to add the retention policy.
• On the new retention policy page, review the configuration settings and click on new to create new retention policy and click on finish to close the wizard.

For Exchange 2013:

• First, open Exchange Admin Center in your system.
• Then at extreme left corner of the screen, select an option Compliance Management.
• Now, on the same screen at at right side, choose the option Retention Policies.
• The three options will be appeared, choose the Default Archive Policy and then choose the (+) plus option, which is at parallel to the organization option.
• A New Retention Policy screen will appear, type the desired name and click on (+)plus option.
• Choose the required retention tag as per the requirement

Now easily add, remove or edit retention policy tags any time.

Note:

User can apply the retention policy to the single users by using a command Set-Mailbox “Exchangequeryadmin”-RetentionPolicy”Excahngequerytest”

Conclusion

As discussed above the way to set the default email retention policy, it makes easy for user to manage the retention policy according to the requirement. It helps in proper management of all email data in their Outlook profile. The process mentioned above provides a proper guidance to the users to configure the retention policy in Exchange 2010 and 2013 as per their need.