Case Review - Retention Adjustments

When a message is archived, its retention is calculated according to the Maximum Retention setting in your Mimecast Account Settings. However, there are situations where you may need to modify the expiration date for emails in your organization's Mimecast Archive, so you can:

• Remove messages from the archive permanently (known as a purge).
• Reduce the time messages are kept in the archive (e.g., personal messages).
• Increase the time messages are kept in the archive. This is useful for customers with a shorter Retention Period who upgrade to a longer Maximum Retention setting.

Considerations

• Retention Adjustments can be applied to messages arising out of an Archive Search, and allow you to change the amount of time messages are retained for.
• The adjustment can be set to either expire emails immediately or after a certain number of days.
• Retention Adjustments cannot be used to extend the retention period of emails longer than your Maximum Retention setting.
• Mimecast uses a single instance storage service, where any email that is subject to a Retention Adjustment is updated or expired in its entirety for all recipients of the message.
• Once a message has expired, it is not recoverable.

What You'll Need

• Two Mimecast Administrators who are members of a protected Administration Console role. One to create the Retention Adjustment, and a second to approve it.

Creating the Retention Adjustment Request

Creating the Request:

1. A Case Review user with Manage Retention Adjustment rights will be able to see an "Add all to Retention Adjustments" button when performing an Archive Search.

2. Clicking the button will take users to a Retention Adjustment Properties page which will allow them to configure details of the request. The adjustment can be set to either expire emails immediately or to a different date than originally set.

Editing/Removing a Request:

1. Any request in Pending state can be: 
   • Edited by the requester.
   • Removed by any user with Manage Retention Adjustment rights.

Approving a Request:

1. Once the request is created, any non-requesting user with Manage Retention Adjustment rights will be able to approve it.
2. Once approved, the request goes through multiple stages until it's Completed.

Viewing Requests:

1. All list of requests can be viewed from the Retention Adjustments menu.
2. More details can be seen by clicking on a request.

Next Steps

Once the Retention Adjustment Job has completed:

• If you used the Reset Message Lifespan option, verify that the retention has been updated on the messages that were part of the search results added to the Retention Adjustment request. See the Viewing Email Retention Information page for more details.
• If you chose the Message Purge Request option, verify that the messages selected to be purged are no longer discoverable in the Mimecast archive. See the Searching the Archive page for further information.