Data Retention - Expire Emails from Mimecast

This article provides information about expiring emails from Mimecast, including retention adjustments, folder-based retention, and content definitions to manage email lifecycle and enforce data destruction policies securely and efficiently.

Mimecast does, however also provide different methods to expire emails from the archive before the retention period. This is controlled by the Administrator, although access for End Users to declare emails for expiry is made available if Folder Based Retention has been implemented in your environment.

Retention Adjustments

Retention Adjustments allow you to modify the expiry date for emails in the archive. When an email is initially archived, it is stamped with an expiry date based on the preservation policies. You may need to change the amount of time the email is retained in the archive, which can be modified using a Retention Adjustment. An adjustment can either be used to expire emails immediately, or to increase / reduce the retention period for emails in the archive.

Permissions are required in order to create and approve a Retention Adjustment. The process is as follows:

• An eDiscovery Case is created, which contains archive searches for the email data to be expired.
• An Discovery Officer creates a Retention Adjustment, based on the eDiscovery case.
• A second Discovery Officer approves the expiry request.

For security reasons, only users with the Discover Officer administrator role is able to assign these permissions. Once emails are expired, they cannot be retrieved.

Folder Based Retention

Folder Based Retention allows users to effect reasonable data destruction policies from Microsoft Outlook using Managed Folders, as well as enabling you to manage the life cycle of emails in Exchange and in the archive. This requires the deployment of the Mimecast Synchronization Engine in your internal environment.

Expire Emails from Mimecast

Folder Based Retention functionality includes:

• Giving End Users the ability to select messages for deletion from Microsoft Outlook and drop them into Mimecast Managed Folders. These folders are configured in the Mimecast Administration Console, and "pushed" into Microsoft Exchange (and therefore the end users Microsoft Outlook client) using the Mimecast Synchronization Engine.
• Allows you to manage Microsoft Exchange Inbox, Sent Items, Junk Mail and Deleted Items remotely, by setting retention policies for each (with an option to include or exclude sub-folders within each folder).
• Allows you to manage the lifespan of messages on a time-based lifespan, from Microsoft Exchange to the Mimecast Archive; until they are finally expired from the Archive permanently. See Mimecast Synchronization Engine - Mailbox Storage Management.

Content Definitions

Preservation Policies are used to stamp emails with a certain retention period when being archived. These Policies are based on traffic flow, and as with all Mimecast Policies allow for granular control. Therefore multiple policies can be configured to apply different retention periods to specific groups/domains or even individual users.

Content Definitions allow you to perform certain actions based on the words, phrases or regular expressions contained in the subject, body, header or even attachment of an email. One available action, should an email trigger a Content Examination Policy, is that the Content and Metadata Preservation period be changed from the existing preservation policies. See Configuring Content Examination.