Looking for old sent mail exchange 2003 1

[daletnelson]

I have a client that has projects that last for 4 or more years. We are running Windows SBS 2003 with Exchange 2003. I need to know if there is a time when the "sent mail" is automatically removed from the server. How can I reconfigure to save all sent mail.

Dale

 

[ShackDaddy]

There is no default age after which a message is deleted. If the user hasn't deleted the message and no age limits were set on the server, then the mail should still be there. I doubt there are any limits in place.

If you want to actually PREVENT mail from being deleted, that's another issue, and you'd probably want to look at an archiving product for that.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[daletnelson]

Thanks. What is a good archiving product?

Dale

 

[ShackDaddy]

Depends on the size of your organization, the reasons why you are archiving, and the depth of your pockets. What's the basic outline here?

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[daletnelson]

Dave
This client has 25 mail boxes and 6000 to 7000 items in the in most box's alone. With projects to go 4 to 5 years it's becoming more important to keep all mail. The budget is less than $1000.

Dale

 

[58sniper]

sent mail" is not automatically configured to be deleted. Copies are stored in the user's mailbox until they delete them; you configure a policy to delete them; or the mailbox is deleted.

What's the need to save them? If it's for legal reasons, throwing just $1k at it may not be enough.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ShackDaddy]

Dale, you might want to consider moving completed projects to a public folder so that they are available for posterity but aren't causing mailbox bloat.

Archiving is usually put in place to preserve what users may delete or to allow you to keep user mailbox sizes within reasonable limits without sacrificing availability of data. For the price you're willing to pay, the best thing would probably be to stick with Exchange as your only tool, and use public folders as an alternate project archive location.

As Pat said, nothing will be deleted unless a user deletes it, so that shouldn't be a concern. Deleted Item Recovery should protect you against user deletions, and you can configure how long you want that "safety net" to hold deleted items before they really fall off the table. Then you have your backups that you can fall back on, if you are preserving any historical backups. You probably don't even need to consider an archiving product at this point: they aren't cheap.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[daletnelson]

Thanks for all your help.

Dale

 

[Zelandakh]

If you don't need to retain for compliance then you can do public folder archiving as suggested.

We've covered archiving many times and have suggested a lot of products - use search to see the discussions.