This article contains information on why emails cannot be deleted or marked as read in Mimecast, covering mailbox storage management, continuity during outages, legal obligations, and GDPR compliance requirements.
Overview
"Why can't emails be deleted or marked as read?" Usually these are received from users of Mimecast Mobile, but we also see users of Mimecast for Outlook and Mimecast Personal Portal ask this. Let's use Mimecast Mobile as our example to outline why this isn't a feature in Mimecast.
Mailbox Storage Management
As a view of your email archive, Mimecast displays all messages received for an end user. This is regardless of whether these have been deleted from your corporate environment. Microsoft Exchange is the most common mail server used by Mimecast customers. Storage for email stored in Microsoft Exchange is expensive. You've probably heard your IT department say they're archiving much of your email. Some IT departments delete all email after six months. This is where Mimecast becomes really useful, even though your organization doesn't have the email any longer. You can still search for it using Mimecast applications, returning results in seconds. With all your data safely stored in Mimecast, your IT departments no longer need to worry about costly maintenance of on-site hardware or increasing storage costs.
Continuity
Alternatively if you've ever heard the IT department say "email is down!", Mimecast Mobile can help you here too. Mimecast is still delivering all your messages whether that's inbound (when receiving messages from other companies) or outbound (when you're sending messages out to other companies). When your Microsoft Exchange server comes back online again, Mimecast delivers all the messages to it allowing you to see them in Microsoft Outlook.
Legal Obligations
Email won't be deleted from Mimecast, as your administrators may have legal requirements to fulfill around the retention of these items. If a message is accidentally deleted from your Microsoft Outlook profile, Mimecast allows you to recover it back into Microsoft Outlook. Marking an email as read, means Mimecast would need to update each message for each customer, and send updates regarding email status back to the Microsoft Exchange server. This isn't currently possible. As soon as it is, we'll add this feature into our applications.
The next time you open Mimecast Mobile, you're taking a look at every email you have in Mimecast. All of it can be searched quickly, even those lengthy word documents you received.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulatory requirement designed to:
- Harmonize data privacy laws across Europe.
- Protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy.
- Reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.
It isn't an end user function. All GDPR requests must be directed to your administrator. See the GDPR Configuration page for full details.
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