How Long Does Office 365 Keep Deleted Emails? Detailed Explanation

Microsoft Office 365 stores mailbox data in the cloud if you don’t delete it either intentionally or accidentally. Although, O365 mailboxes are abstract and can be lost due to some miss clicks. Thus, many organizations are facing the problem of data loss due to increasing data day by day and its complexity. Now, after analysing the increasing number of problems due to such issues, many users have queries like how long does Office 365 keep deleted items? How long are deleted items kept in Office 365 and the retention policies of O365 mailboxes?

You can read this post and can get all your answers here:

Important Note: Regular backups have become extremely important for both O365 home as well as enterprise users. They can take help of the third-party application to export PST file from Office 365 and can take backups on regular intervals.

How Long Does Office 365 Keep Emails during Retention Period?

Recently, Microsoft did some changes in its Exchange Server Hosting. And these changes provide a facility to keep the deleted messages “forever”. It also provides the ability to configure the Default MRM (Messaging Records Management) deleted items retention policy.

By using this option users can increase their retention period. And also can control how long does Office 365 keep deleted emails problems according to their requirements. In Microsoft O365, users can also use the On-premises Exchange Administrator option which can increase their Retention Period from 30 to 24855 days.

What Happens After Deletion of Office 365 Mails?

Whenever you delete the items of Office 365, the deleted items directly move to the Deleted Items folder. Now, we have two options either we will keep the items in the Deleted Items folder (according to the retention policies of Office 365) or specify that OWA (Outlook Web App) empties the folder whenever you log out. The email messages stay in the Deleted items folder until you delete them manually from the folder. And after that, the items will move to the Hidden Deleted Items folder. But still, you can recover those deleted items from the Hidden Deleted Items folders within the next 30 days. And after 30 days, the data will be deleted permanently and can no longer be retrieved.

Key Features of Office 365 Retention Policy

• Every mailbox in the Office 365 account is assigned a Retention policy.
• The Default Retention Policy includes a tag that will transfer the data items to the archive mailbox after 2 years.
• When a Retention policy of Office 365 is applied to the Office 365 mailboxes, it will also apply to the online archive mailbox.
• If the mailbox size of any mailbox is less than 10 MB, then it is not processed in the scheduled task. You have to run the task manually to apply retention policy on it.
• O365 retention policy task is a scheduled process and runs once a week. This means that deleted emails can be restored within 7 days after the expiry duration.

Read More: Find out the Limitations of Office 365 Shared Mailbox

Retention Policies of Office 365

When we are using the cloud platform for saving the data and other purposes. A crucial question comes in everyone’s mind that’s How long are deleted items kept in Office 365? To resolve such problems Microsoft has introduced some retention policies which allows users to manage the amount of Retention Period time.

• Default Retention Policy
  Microsoft offers default Retention Policy in Office 365. It consists of some options like inbox, junk email folders, deleted items, drafts, sent items folders having the default tag of retention period which cannot be modified by the users.



• Managed Retention Policy
  Here users can only manage the previously created policies by Microsoft. Outlook Web App (OWA) allows the users to view the Retention Policies created by the administration. The Retention time duration setting for all the folders and messages has been set to Never Delete by default.

Steps for managing the Retention Policies of Office 365 are following:

• Step 1: The first step is to Sign-in to the Outlook on the Web account.
• Step 2: Click on Outlook option from the page.
• Step 3: Now, Click on the Settings icon >> Options >> Mail >> Retention Policies.

Create Retention Policy

Now, you can assign the retention policy to Office 365 message or folder according to your requirements. Perform the following steps to do the same:

• Step 1: Login to the Outlook Web Apps account.
• Step 2: Then select Outlook or Mail option and go to the folder pane.
• Step 3: After that, Select the assign policy option otherwise Select Use Parent Folder policy option.

Conclusion

Nowadays, accidental data deletion or data loss in Office 365 is a major problem for the users as well as organizations. We can retrieve our lost data because of retention policy, but it does not provide guarantee for data protection. Although, the retention policy may vary for each cloud application.

So, it is difficult to know how long does Office 365 keep deleted emails? To avoid such problems, you can create a backup of you data with the help of automated solution mentioned above. It helps to maintain the backup files and get back the data after the completion of Retention period.