Creating and assigning retention policies in Exchange 2013

Retention of data from a legal point of view can have some serious implications - using retention tags can help users / the administrator easily manage this problem.

By default retention policies are available to end users with the Outlook client by right-hand clicking on a mail item or folder, selecting "Assign policy" and choosing one of the pre-defined policies e.g. 1 Month Delete.

Administrators also have the ability to create custom retention policies to meet business needs - although you must firstly be a member of the Organization Management, Recipient Management and Records Management role groups to perform the following operation.

We will firstly create / define a policy tag:

New-RetentionPolicyTag "JBloggs-DeletedItems" -Type DeletedItems -Comment "Deleted Items are purged after 30 days" -RetentionEnabled $true -AgeLimitForRetention 30 -RetentionAction PermanentlyDelete

This creates a policy tag called "JBloggs-DeletedItems" that is scoped to the DeletedItems folder which will permanently delete emails in this folder after 30 days.

We should proceed by then creating a retention policy (which allows us to combine all of the relevant policy tags together) - and define our newly created policy tag:

New-RetentionPolicy "RetentionPolicy01" -RetentionPolicyTagLinks "JBloggs-DeletedItems"

Finally we can assign the retention policy to the user's mailbox as follows:

Set-Mailbox "Joe Bloggs" -RetentionPolicy "RetentionPolicy01"