rseiler
Senior Member
- Outlook version
- Outlook 2016 32 bit
- Email Account
- Outlook.com (as MS Exchange)
MS is mute about what the retention period for Deleted Items is. They don't actually say what it is in any support document that I've found. New to using Outlook against Outlook.com in Exchange mode (as opposed to POP3, where there is no retention period) for the last month, I'm actually paying attention to this now.
The retention period appears to be one week, but there are complications.
First, I see that newly deleted items when opened in Outlook say "This item will expire in 6 days." So, rounding up, I guess it's one week, which seems absurdly short to me. Seriously, insanely short considering the GBs of space. Gmail doesn't work this way.
It goes on to say "To keep this longer apply a different retention policy." Which isn't possible on Outlook.com as it is in Office 365.
If I go back a week in my Deleted Items, Outlook tells me that "This item has expired," but it's still there (this is good, but weird, since what does expired even mean then).
Starting at about two weeks ago, let's say 9/10/2018 for this example, it says "Retention Policy: Consumer Deleted Items (1 week). Expires 9/17/2018." But it's still there.
Messages go back about a month, though there are a few older stragglers. Definitely not one week.
This doesn't even get into the Recovery area, which MS does say is supposed to be good for 30 more days (so, I guess 7+30). But this doesn't seem to work as advertised either. I see that it did the vast majority of its work on 9/12/2018 ("Deleted On"--it did the deleting, I didn't) and very little before or since. Messages in Recovery date back several months (good, but again unpredictable, as the purging can seemingly happen at any time).
Is any of this normal?
The retention period appears to be one week, but there are complications.
First, I see that newly deleted items when opened in Outlook say "This item will expire in 6 days." So, rounding up, I guess it's one week, which seems absurdly short to me. Seriously, insanely short considering the GBs of space. Gmail doesn't work this way.
It goes on to say "To keep this longer apply a different retention policy." Which isn't possible on Outlook.com as it is in Office 365.
If I go back a week in my Deleted Items, Outlook tells me that "This item has expired," but it's still there (this is good, but weird, since what does expired even mean then).
Starting at about two weeks ago, let's say 9/10/2018 for this example, it says "Retention Policy: Consumer Deleted Items (1 week). Expires 9/17/2018." But it's still there.
Messages go back about a month, though there are a few older stragglers. Definitely not one week.
This doesn't even get into the Recovery area, which MS does say is supposed to be good for 30 more days (so, I guess 7+30). But this doesn't seem to work as advertised either. I see that it did the vast majority of its work on 9/12/2018 ("Deleted On"--it did the deleting, I didn't) and very little before or since. Messages in Recovery date back several months (good, but again unpredictable, as the purging can seemingly happen at any time).
Is any of this normal?