back to article Microsoft to store deleted Exchange Online mails FOREVER

Microsoft has changed its data retention policy for Office 365 email and the upshot is that deleted items will never disappear, unless you set up a policy to bin them. Exchange Online currently deletes things in the Deleted Items folder after 90 days. Redmond's pitching the new policy, explained here, as a hedge against …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a load of crap

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      What a load of crap cloud.

      (Or so they hope).

  2. P. Lee
    Meh

    All those powerpoint presentations emailed around

    If you need to keep records for seven years, you'll need.... an upgrade!

    Yay!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RLY - thats nice

    So you put your corporate email on a cloudy system - convenient and cheap with lots of bells and whistles - smashing.

    Then you write a note to someone, realize that it's {sexist | defamatory | terrorist | just plain bollocks | naughty} and delete it, except you didn't really delete it.

    Oh good, it can come back to haunt you via channels you don't even know exist or in the case of the lovely RIPA wished didn't exist. Your country will probably already have something just as lovely as our RIPA.

    With RIPA in place, inter pares, you won't even get to complain about it either. Now *that's* the modern way.

    Cheers

    Jon

    PS http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/section/54 : "to keep secret the giving of the notice, its contents and the things done in pursuance of it." I won't spell it out - that's been done elsewhere.

    1. big_D Silver badge

      Re: RLY - thats nice

      On the other hand in many countries all business related emails have to be kept for a long time.

      Here in Germany all business related (especially financial or contractual) emails have to be kept for 10 years. And that has to be in unalterable form. In general that means products like Exchange implement a secure store in the background and all emails are kept for the 10 years (Exchange cannot / is not allowed to distinguish between private, business and spam). Everything that makes it onto the server is therefore stored in the secure store.

      Which means that most companies have a ban on the use of company mail accounts for private emails, because they are not allowed to store or access private communications; unless the employee is informed, so you are told, no private emails and if they are private, then we/auditors/authorities will have the possibility of seeing them, because we have to store all communications due to tax law.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: RLY - thats nice

        I was also interested in what "spoliation" was, I think they must just mean "spoiling".

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Some employers in the states have document retention policies

    They only keep mail 7 years so e-discovery cannot dig up stuff older than 7 years, this will create an issue for those... I think this is funny.

    Lets say at 6.5 years you are given an e-Discovery request and it turns up you need to recover 150 gig of data. That is going to cost some $. :-) MS knows to keep 6.5 years on a very enterprise D2D2T unit it might have cost $250,000 per year, so this is the chance to get the customer to pay 1.5 million for that restore. :-)

    "Take what you can, give nothing back." - Microsoft 2021

    1. localzuk Silver badge

      Re: Some employers in the states have document retention policies

      Not sure you understand the system. You can restore emails in Office 365 at the click of a few buttons. The system is already there, and people use it daily. All Microsoft have done is change from 90 days to infinite for the ability to go and find and restore those emails.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Some employers in the states have document retention policies

        "All Microsoft have done is change from 90 days to infinite ^THE DEFAULT POLICY SETTINGS^ for the ability to go and find and restore those emails."

        Fixed it for you. You can still set 90 days if you want to...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Some employers in the states have document retention policies

      "Lets say at 6.5 years you are given an e-Discovery request and it turns up you need to recover 150 gig of data. That is going to cost some $"

      Only if you say use a home internet connection with a cap. For most of us on a decent corporate internet connection, to download 150GB takes a few minutes and is free.

  5. Khaaaaaaaaaan
    Thumb Down

    Yeah, no.

    Sorry, MS. We're trying to shrink our eDiscovery footprint NOT inflate it. To quote the Brits, "PISS OFF!" :-)

    1. localzuk Silver badge

      Re: Yeah, no.

      What part of "unless you set up a policy to bin them" is causing you trouble?

      1. Captain Queeg

        Re: Yeah, no.

        > What part of "unless you set up a policy to bin them" is causing you trouble?

        That's a fair point, but It's broadly similar to concerns around the UK's Porn filter.

        There'll be a (slightly paranoid) suspicion that one day some over zealous prosecutor tries to brand changing the default setting as "actively destroying emails" and therefore clear evidence of wrong doing - "You were given the ability to store all email forever at no extra cost and you actively chose not to and switched it off? Are those the actions of an innocent man? Etc, etc..."

        Should something like that ever to go to court, regardless of local retention laws, it's anyone's guess how the chips would fall. I imagine a lot would hinge on the state of M'Lord's Haemorrhoids on the day.

  6. Mike Dimmick

    Filing system

    This is probably to deal with people who use the Deleted Items folder as a filing system. I've worked with people who do this - they move messages to Deleted Items once they've been actioned but expect them to stay there indefinitely for archive purposes.

    On-premises Exchange leaves them alone, so I'm not surprised to see Exchange Online doing the same thing.

  7. Chris Miller

    Shift-delete?

    On 'real' Outlook, shift-delete actually deletes an item, as opposed to moving it to the "Deleted Items" folder (just as with files). I've no idea whether the same holds true if you're using web-based Outlook365, since I have a 10-foot bargepole under my desk with which I'm not prepared to touch it, but it reads as though you can set an option to keep deleted items only fro a set period of time - it's just that the default has been changed to 'keep forever'.

    1. big_D Silver badge

      Re: Shift-delete?

      Only from your personal account. The secure store in the background cannot be deleted, so the emails remain. This is a legal requirement in some countries - hence why it has been implemented in Exchange since 2007.

  8. Griffo

    Sorry Reg - you got it wrong.

    I suggest that you re-read the blog.

    Microsoft is NOT going to store "deleted emails forever". What they are doing is allowing the company to choose how long items are retained in the "deleted items" folder before being automatically removed. If a user shift-deletes an item, or deletes it from the "deleted items" folder, then it will as always move to the "recoverable items" folder, then be removed completely.

  9. Griffo

    Badly Reported

    I posted a comment earlier, maybe it's my new account so it has to be approved, so I hope this isn't a double post.

    Anyway, the tone of this article is misleading. Microsoft does NOT keep copies of every deleted email forever. What they have done, is to replicate the behavior of on-premise exchange.

    Prior to this change, O365 would automatically clean out emails in the "Deleted Items" folder when they were 30 days old. The emails would then go to the dumpster or "recoverable items" folder for a further 30 days, then be expunged for good.

    What this change does, is removes the automatic removal of emails from the "Deleted Items" folder in the DEFAULT email policy. That's it. An administrator can re-enable it. If a user Shift-Deletes, then the email still goes to the dumpster, then is expunged, even if this policy is enabled. If this user deletes an email from the "Deleted Items" folder, it too will move to the dumpster then be expunged. This simply replicates on-premise exchange behavior.

    Despite what other people have posted, these emails are not kept forever in some "secure background" storage unless the administrator puts the mailbox into litigation hold mode, which was an existing feature.

  10. Mage Silver badge

    Of course

    Really important emails will sometimes get deleted before you read them, due to unforeseen impact of patches, upgrades, data centre reconfiguration.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Last paragraph has it nailed

    MS trying to extract more revenue.

    EU has a data retention regime where data should be destroyed after it's 'useful' period has expired, this policy will transgress that line.

  12. okcomputer44

    Default policy

    Then probably is time to start dealing with the regular Inbox policy crap.

    I remember our first migration to O365, and then the user's shouting after the migration, because of the "default" policies applied.

    Source: http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/158/t/21662.aspx

    "There are some default retention policy in Office 365. If the emails are old and hit by the default retention policy, they may disappear automatically."

    Be honest can't remember exactly if this was the case, but few users lost their stuff, after the migration.

    Could not reach the old exchange server anymore, so it was gone.

    So you must read the "12k." pages, before you touch anything on Ms. ;)

    Anyhow thank God I don't need to deal with that anymore...

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